


An Invincible Summer

by SpoonerizeSwiftness (SplickedyHat)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Broken Bones, Fauns & Satyrs, Gen, Healing, Nature Magic, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, You may be a lesser god with a cult following but Karkat ain't takin' any of your shit
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-14
Updated: 2015-05-10
Packaged: 2017-12-26 12:56:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 26,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/966179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SplickedyHat/pseuds/SpoonerizeSwiftness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Request: Some form of holy/spiritual!Karkatdemonic!Gamzee.  </p><p>He’s something wild and strange—his blood and his eyes are the color of the bacchanalian wine and filled with the same banked frenzy…but none of the joy.  Well you’re supposed to be a free spirit of nature and your wings are useless, blood-colored abominations.  Who are you to judge him for not being happy?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. my cloven brethren

**Author's Note:**

> “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” - Albert Camus

You find it first because the forest all around it is dead.

Of course, most of the forest is dead anyway right now—it’s fall and you’re the only one out, a flash of red and orange through the red and orange trees—but not like this.  This is  _rot._   Destruction, not natural death. 

You pick your way through the mess of snapped branches and crushed plants, the rotted handprints on leaning tree trunks and heavy footprints like the cloven hooves of a goat but much, much bigger.  The intruder didn’t take much care to cover their trail. 

And it all leads to a crooked heap of rocks by the stream,  smeared with something thick and wet and deep purple.

You slow down as you get closer.  You’re very fast, almost as fast as the other spirits even with your useless wings, but there are things that are much much faster.  Getting near this, whatever it is, is probably a terrible idea.

You duck your head, and crouch at the entrance to the cave.

There’s a dark shape huddled inside; you can see the dark, smooth curve of a back, skin a deep greyish color in the darkness.  A pair of horns, a long, flattened ear and what looks like hundreds of criss-crossing bleeding wounds. 

Whatever it is, it doesn’t move when you block the light from the entrance. It doesn’t breathe.  Maybe it staggered here to die—maybe it’s already dead…

“Hello?”  You try.

**_LEAVE ME ALONE_ **

The voice almost knocks you flat on your back.  It’s not something you hear—it’s a thought, shoved gracelessly into your mind at skull-shattering volume.

“You’re alive, then, huh?” You say, dazed.

**_I SAID LEAVE_ **

“No.”  You scoot a little close—your head hurts and your ears are ringing—just being near it is making the leaves that grow across your scalp and onto your cheeks and ears wilt a little.  “What happened to you?  Are you okay?”

There’s silence for a second, and then the being in the cave finally shifts and rolls itself painfully around to glare out at you. 

It has a face almost like yours, but stretched and flattened, as goatlike as its bent, cloven feet.  Its eyes are baleful gold-orange and bacchanalian violet, and there are three deep, bloody and inflamed gashes across its face like the clawmarks of some great, wild beast.  One of its wrists and one of its legs are strange and crooked.  There’s blood on its face and hands and back—you’re not surprised it’s miserable, or hiding from prying eyes.

That doesn’t mean that you want it killing off your part of the forest, though.

_WHAT ARE YOU_

Its voice is quieter, still painful but not nearly as bad as before.  Its mouth is a mass of jagged fangs—it cocks its head to one side and looks at you with those big purple and gold eyes.  Its pupils are sideways, flat like a goat’s. 

“I’m a nature spirit,” you say, and flex your wings in demonstration—its eyes follow the tattered webs and then flick back to your face.  “You’re rotting my forest.”

It blinks at you slowly. 

“…usually you apologize when you do something like that,” you snap at it.  It blinks again, sharper this time, and its ears flatten a little further.

_APOLOGIZE_

“Yes, apologize!  Say you’re sorry for, y’know, destroying a bunch of my trees and rotting the undergrowth!”

_I DON’T KNOW_

_HOW TO DO THAT_

Alright.  Okay.  Well, there’s no point yelling at it for something it doesn’t know how to do.  You’re not going to scream at it.  You are  _not_  going to scream at it.

“…you’re hurt, right?”

It looks away from you—curls up a little tighter around its swollen arm.  You can feel that, like the sensation that’s given off by a snapped tree-branch; wrongness, disconnect.  Your fingers itch to fix it.

“…is there anything I can get you to help?”

It snarls.  

_**HUMAN SOULS** _

You whap it on the back of the head. 

“I don’t know what you are,” you tell it, and it hisses between its teeth and stares at you like it can’t believe you just hit it.  “—but we don’t eat souls here.  That’s dark magic stuff and.  If you want to do dark magic,  _do it outside of my forest.”_

_I CAN’T LEAVE_

_CAN’T DEPART THIS FORSAKEN PLACE_

**_MY LEG_ **

“I know.”

It huffs air through those sharp teeth, but this time it sounds less like a snarl and more like a sigh.

_YOU’RE PUSHY_

**_FOR A THING SO BITE-SIZED_ **

_FINE THEN_

**_BRING ME FLESH_ **

_MEAT_

**_AND FOOD OF MY CLOVEN BRETHREN_ **

_YOU KNOW WHAT A GOAT EATS, BROTHER_

“Yeah, I do,” you say, because you’ve had goats loose in your part of the forest before.  “Basically everything, that’s what goats eat.”

_BLACKBERRY_

**_THE PLANT THE SACRIFICES CALL HONEYSUCKLE_ **

_NETTLES AND MUSTARD AND MULBERRIES_

**_NIGHTSHADE, BROTHER, AND FLESH_ **

_BRING ME THESE_

“Fine, fine.” You ruffle your leaves—they’re definitely crisper than they should be.  You hate having that bright dying-harvest-season color on your head and your wings like a splash of blood, but you don’t want to lose all your leaves either.  But before you go… “…here, give me your arm.”

It recoils and snarls at you.  You roll your eyes at it.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” you snap at it.  “It hurts every time you move it, right?  I just want to set the bone.  Haven’t you ever seen a bone-setting before?”

It blinks at you some more.  It seem to be having trouble with the idea that you want to help it.  Its eyes are already strangely wide, but you think they’re widening in confusion.

“Give it here,” you demand, and even though it has to be a lesser god of some sort and you have absolutely no right to be ordering it around, it pins its ears back and painfully lifts its arm to offer it to you.  Moving it makes it whimper.  You feel…okay, you feel kind of bad about that.  “…good,” you tell it, feeling stupid, and are surprised when it relaxes a little at that, and shifts over so you can reach its arm more easily. “That’s…good.  Now, this might hurt a little bit, but it’ll be better when it’s done, okay?”

_You said it wasn’t going to hurt_

__

Its voice is quieter than it’s ever been, almost…scared.  You sigh a little bit and press your fingertips as gently as you can over the swelling on its arm, feeling out the break.  It’s snapped in three places, and the bone is truly wrecked, what did it  _do_  to itself?

“I’m not going to hurt you any more than I absolutely have to,” you clarify.  “…and I’m going to make it better.”

Even with the warning, it howls and starts to jerk away when you have to straighten its crooked forearm.  There’s sickness in its bones; you chase that out at least, and then pick up a branch off the ground as it whines and press it as gently as you can against its broken arm.  The dead twigs tremble and twist and then twine out like vines, wrapping its arm up to the fingers and back to the elbow with solid but flexible wood.

Its mouth isn’t made for words, but you can hear it howling in your head and it’s making horrible noises to your ears as well, this torn, hissing, spitting snarl like the worst noises of meat and plant eaters combined.  You make sure the wooden brace around its arm isn’t too tight, and then let go—it pulls it back to its chest immediately and glares at you through those strange, wild eyes.

**_IF I HAD THE INCLINATION_ **

**_I WOULD SLAUGHTER YOU FOR THAT TRICK_ **

**_YOU WING-BROKEN FREAK_ **

You flinch at that.  “—yeah, but you can’t move,” you remind it, and as it tries to lunge for you strong roots snap out of the side of the cave and lash tight around its good wrist.  “—you  _tell_   _me_ your other arm doesn’t feel better now.  Look me in the eyes and tell me!”

It slumps back, panting and snarling.  Hesitates a second.  It doesn’t meet your eyes.

“That’s what I thought,” you tell it, and god knows why you’re trying to figure out the best places to find mulberry and blackberry and hemlock, but you stand up and rub the back of your neck absently.  The roots of your wings are a hard, familiar ridge under your fingers.  “…You just stay there.  Are you thirsty?”

A long, long pause.  By green growth, this thing sulks like a new spirit.  How old is it?

“ _Are you thirsty?_ ”

… _yes_

You lean down and coax the roots to shift a little; even the ones that were so recently connected to a living tree still have enough life left in them to churn the ground, and the water from the stream forms a shallow loop around the cave, where it can easily reach out and take a handful of water if it needs to. 

“Now you say ‘thank you’,” you remind it.

Another long, sulky pause.

… _thank you_

_PUSHY MOUTHFUL_

Well, that’s going to have to do.  You turn your face to the scent of meat and nettles and mustard and berries, and start walking.


	2. gods do not plead

You don’t meet anyone as you flicker from branch to branch, searching for the plants you need—you do see some humans, though, and in that at least fortune is in your favor; you circle them and make the trees rattle and the roots writhe and they drop the deer they killed and bow in terrified reverence before leaving the clearing at a run. 

One of the local deities will probably end up getting the offerings for that, but you haven’t ever really enjoyed getting offerings anyway, so it doesn’t matter.  What matters if you have the flesh of a healthy young doe and you didn’t have to find one that was old or dying and take it back.  You cannot kill, and that makes getting fresh, tender meat really difficult sometimes.

You pull the body onto your shoulders over your wing joints (lucky she was small) and start walking again.  She’s not heavy, really—weight doesn’t matter to you like it does to humans—but you’re small for a spirit and the body is unwieldy.  So all in all you’re in a fairly nasty mood by the time you haul her back to the cave next to the river, with blood dripping down one of your shoulders and a bunch of plants in a bundle tied up under one arm. The wounds it left on the forest are already starting to heal—thank everything powerful and good your power to heal your land doesn’t depend on only  _positive_  strong emotion.  You know a lot of spirits whose powers work that way, and you would have no chance.

It’s moved a little from where you found it; it’s half out of the cave now, dragging its bad leg and leaning on its good arm to bring its face down to the water of the tributary you made for it. 

It startles when you get close, and looks up at you like it’s been caught doing something it shouldn’t.  It hisses softly—then as you come closer it retreats in earnest, pulling itself away from the water and starting to edge back into the darkness of its cave.

Well, it tries to, anyway.  Its broken leg catches at the ground as it tries to roll back, and it lets out a horrible sound and slumps again, breathing hard and fast through its ludicrous fangs, not looking at you.  You think maybe it’s prouder than you would have guessed at first—it ordered you around instead of asking you for things, and now it can’t bear to watch you watching it in pain. 

You don’t have a lot of patience for prideful beings.  You drop down next to it, grab a stick, and grow a skin of bark and wood around its broken leg.  It howls and tries to kick you with its other foot—you lash it to the ground with a thick root and burn the infection out of that bone as well.  It’s over in the space of a few breaths—you’re not kind, but you certainly aren’t cruel.  Its eyes are running, and it tries a baleful glare that just turns out furious and hurt. 

“Now stop trying to move and just let me take care of you, alright?” you snap at it, and it makes a whining, growling sound and howls a few choice words into your skull.  You sigh.  Yes, alright, maybe you could have handled that better.  “…I’m sorry.  There, see?  That’s what you do when you do something bad to somebody.  Remember that.”

It hisses at you, but it looks more sulky than furious now.  It’s eyes keep flickering past you to the body of the deer on the ground.

“How do you eat?”

_COOKED_

**_CHARRED FLESH_ **

_OR RAW_

**_MY PARTICULARITY GOES AS FAR AS YOU JUST GETTING THAT SHIT INTO MY MOUTH_ **

_NO FURTHER_

“Okay.” You don’t like starting fires any more than you like trying to hunt down edible meat, but you are partial to the outcome—humans had a good idea when they came up with cooking flesh before they ate it.  But before that… “…what do you say when you want something?”

The response is immediate and unhesitating.

**_GIVE IT TO ME_ **

“No.”

It blinks at you.

_WHAT DO YOU MEAN_

**_NO_ **

“I mean the thing you say when you’re asking someone for something is ‘please’.”

It sneers—as well as it can with that lipless mouth. 

_Gods_

_DO NOT_

**_PLEAD_ **

“Do gods want to _eat_?”

It huffs through its nose.

“Well?”

_PUSHY_

**_ALWAYS PUSHING AND PUSHING_ **

_YOU’LL PUSH TOO FAR_

**_YOU’LL GET TO THINGS YOU AREN’T OF WONT TO SEE_ **

_WINGLESS MOUTHFUL_

“I can just eat this by myself if you would like,” you say pointedly, and settle down next to the doe.  You’ve got a curved blade—you draw it out of the air and set about cleaning the body.  “You’re not going to get any by taking cheap shots at my wings either, _noseless._ ”

It looks vaguely affronted.

_I got a nose_

“No you don’t.”

_DO SO_

“And I’ve got wings!”

_Broken ones_

“Yeah, well, your nose is _flat_.”

_YOU’VE GOT BLOOD LEAVES LIKE A FREAK_

“Your blood is purple!”

It doesn’t answer.  It just lies there, making this hacking, choking sound.  You feel, kind of, maybe a little bit concerned and come closer, and it lifts its face up just enough you can see the corners of its lipless mouth drawn back, its round eyes crinkling up. 

It’s _laughing._

_You’re funny_

_I LIKE YOU_

_A fair bit more than I’d credited_

_PUSHY LITTLE_

“No, okay.” You cut it off, and wave your bloody blade at it.  “—I’m not a ‘pushy little mouthful’ okay, I’m a nature spirit and you’re in _my forest_ , so get that right.  This is my place.  And my name is Karkat.”

_Karkat_

_FUNNY NAME FOR A FUNNY_

_Spirit_

Well it’s better than him comparing you to some form of food at least.  You seek out pieces of dead wood, pile them up and concentrate until they burst into flame.  It watches hungrily as you slice off thin pieces of meat and dangle them above the fire to sizzle and drip.  It smells amazing.  Even if you get nothing else out of helping this ingrate of a demigod, you’ll get a hot venison dinner. 

“I bet your name is funnier than mine,” you say eventually, more idly than nastily this time, and make another smooth cut.  It smells like blood and cooking meat—the plants around you turn their leaves and beg and you chop of little pieces of meat and drop it to their roots, letting the rot creep into it.  Their roots curl around the food and they twine up towards the light.  “What are you called, then?”

It makes a noise in your head so sudden and loud and horrible you drop your knife and cover your ears with both hands. 

The noise stops.  You uncover your ears and glare at it.

"What was  _that_ for?!"

_You asked for my name_

_I GRANTED YOU THAT_

“Well your name is horrible to listen to and it’s making my head hurt!” You rub at your skull— _wow_ , humans sometimes have problems hearing the true names of spirits, but he really is from some bad stock if _your_ head hurts that much from hearing it.  “I’m giving you a new one I can actually say without burning my mouth. What’s that word—yeah.  I’m going to call you ‘ _gamzee’_.”

It cocks its head to one side and frowns at you with its eyes.

_…GAMZEE_

“It’s a human word for ‘goat’.”  It huffs through its teeth.  “Oh come on, it’s not like there are going to be any humans around to laugh at you.  You look like a goat.  You’ve got feet like a goat.  You called them your brethren.  So yeah, I’m calling you Gamzee.”

_MORE OF YOUR KIND_

_Know the human words_

_THOSE WHO’LL SAY_

_He takes the name of an animal_

 “Nobody is going to make fun of you for the name, great good growth.”  You roll your eyes.  ‘He’, huh?  Okay.  Well, you thought it looked like a male, but there’s no assuming.  “Okay then, _Gamzee_ , all you have to do is ask politely and you get some of this.  Otherwise I’m finishing it off myself and calling over some friends who’ll be a lot politer about it.  So do you want some or not?”

He rumbles low in his chest.

… _YES_

… _please_

You tear off a piece of the roasting meat and a branch of the mulberry you brought and hand them over.  He tears into them like he’s been starving for a season.

“You’re welcome,” you tell him—he ignores you.  Well, you’ll fight that battle later.  You glance up at the sky and snag a roasting slice of meat; it’s delicious.  The sun is setting through the tree trunks, and you can feel flowers and plants curling themselves away for the night around you.  “You want help getting back in the cave for the night?”

Gamzee growls.

_WHY SHOULD I TAKE SHELTER_

He sounds less angry in your mind now, at least.  The food seems to be making him sleepy; he picks up a branch of nightshade and chews on it idly. 

“I don’t want your horrible face stunting the growth of the new plants that I need to bring up to replace the ones you wrecked,” you tell him bluntly, and frown at him.  “…you should clean those cuts up before they get sick, too.”

He cringes a little.

_Why should i_

His voice is doing that thing again, where it goes a little bit soft, almost shaky.  He sounds very vulnerable when he does that, for all his ferocious snarls and his pride, and you wish he didn’t because it makes your stomach feel strange. 

“Because otherwise your face will start to rot and I’ll have to do what I did to your broken bones to your face.” You put a thick chunk of meat up to cook and throw a few more dead sticks on the fire, so you don’t have to look at those wide, violet-gold eyes.  “…you remember what it felt like when I burned the sickness out of them?  You want that on your face and all over your back?”

He flinches.

_No_

_I DON’T WANT YOUR CLAWS NEAR MY BLEEDING SELF EITHER_

And then, soft again,

_I don’t like things that hurt_

“Nobody does.” You could go out hunting, but you don’t want to walk away from the fire—you put a hand to the ground and reach with all your might, and a soft stem of silver-green, downy leaves springs up between your fingers.  You pluck a few of them and hold them out to him.  “—here.  See this?”

He hesitates, then reaches out and takes the leaf from you, running his darkened, calloused fingertips over it.  His ears perk up. 

_What is that_

_GROWN OUT OF DIRT AND ROCKS BUT SO SOFT_

_What kind of plant feels like this_

“Human’s call it ‘lamb’s ear’,” you tell him, and his lipless mouth twists a little like he’s smiling.  “I can use that to clean up your face a little bit, and then you can get some actual sleep and I won’t have to deal with your face oozing all over the place because of all the foul things you got in the cuts.  Alright?”

He hesitates, then dips those massive goat horns in a nod. 

“Good.”  You pluck some more of the largest leaves—you have them growing almost as large as your hand—and dip it in the stream water.  “…sit still and don’t snap at me.”

His skin is cool when you touch it, but warmer around the cuts—you frown, and he whines when you dab at the place the middle cut splits deep into the bridge of his nose.  The skin there is dark and surprisingly soft, and you hate yourself for maybe rubbing your fingertips against the short, velvety fuzz of fur. You hate yourself even more when his eyes unfocus a little and he leans minutely into your petting hand. 

By the time your careful wiping and scrubbing gets the worst of the crusted purple blood off his face it’s almost dark.  You give him some honeysuckle and the cooked haunch of venison and he slumps in relief and takes them from you, hunching over them.  Then, sudden and quiet, 

_Thank you_

You jump a little and stare at him, and he seems to suddenly realize what he just said.  He tenses up all over again.

_WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT_

“Nothing.”  Huh.  You didn’t even have to prompt him.  “Okay, big tough demigod, turn around and I’m going to clean up your back.  What did you even do to yourself?”

His ears flatten.  He doesn’t answer, but he doesn’t complain either, just shuffles awkwardly around and lets you run trickles of water over the scratches and cuts on his back.  Those go by without too much of a hitch; they’re mostly on his shoulders and his spine, and he’s certainly not happy but he only twitches and makes little warning snarling noises when you have to lift his wild hair out of the way to wipe blood off the back of his neck (and Kanaya makes fun of you for your hair, at least leaves don’t work themselves into massive, unmanageable tangles). 

Then you wipe away a streak of blood on one sharp shoulderblade, and he tenses and shivers.  There’s a silvery scar patch of skin under your fingers, almost like a scar but smoother.  You poke at it again.  He growls.

“What is this?”

_A brother can’t walk around all dressed up all the time_

_CAN’T GET HIS REVEAL OF HIS GODLY MIGHT SO SIMPLE NOW_

_Can’t carry around real wings in these tiny places_

_REAL WINGS LIKE YOU HAVEN’T GOT_

_But a body remembers where they’re at_

_WHERE THEY’RE PLACED WHEN THEY’RE GETTING THEIR REALNESS ON_

_And you’re touchin’ it awful familiar and you can’t comprehend_

_CAN’T BEGIN TO GET YOUR KNOWIN’_

_On how strange it feels to have your claws on the inside of something_

_THAT I DON’T FOR THIS BRIEFEST SECOND TRULY HAVE_

_You’re touching something that ain’t there_

_SO QUIT_

“You have wings?”  You poke the spot again.  He growls again, louder.  “You can just…send them away and bring them back?”

_You think I walk around with one face always the same_

_YOU THINK I’M BOUND LIKE YOU TO A SINGLE SHAPE_

_Brother this is not the face I wear alone_

_THIS IS THE FACE OF A GOD_

“You don’t normally look like this?”  He shakes his head.  “Well what do you look like then?”

_That face is mine_

_MINE ONLY_

He lowers his horns, and even though he’s not looking at you the threat is clear. 

**_IT IS NONE OF YOUR BLIGHTED CONCERN_ **

And just like that, the conversation is over.  You finish cleaning up the last of the cuts, making a bit of half-hearted effort of avoid the places where his wings aren’t, tell him to sleep on his side, and then curl up by the fire, pointedly not watching him.  You feel his eyes on the back of your neck, until finally his breathing evens out to a low, steady rhythm and you close your eyes and drift off, dreaming of flight.


	3. look on me

When you wake up the next morning, he’s still there.   And he keeps still being there, through the next day, and the day after that, and the days after that—when you work through the deer, as the forest he wrecked grows up and starts to lose its leaves in the cold, as frost starts to silver you and your forest as you sleep.  And you find out more and more about him as his bones so-slowly knit together and the wheals on his back gradually start to heal.  He takes to sitting outside the cave; he whittles away at strong, hollow reeds, binds them together and you discover he knows how to play pipes.  He makes an insulted noise at the suggestion that he might not. 

_Nobility has to know it_

“Killing, hunting, acceptance of sacrifice, and how to play pipes?” You nod sagely.  “—gods forbid you don’t know how to make bizarre aimless tooting noises through broken sticks. That would be uncivilized.” 

His snorting laugh interrupts his playing, and he kicks out at you with his good foot as you jump away.

You find out he has a clan; that when he calls himself ‘nobility’, he means it.  He talks in hushed murmurs about someone he won’t name, the only person above him; a king, a god, the one the offerings of the churches in the human cities go to.  You don’t go near the largest cities; he tells you never to go there, never to go to the place where the forest ends, because that’s where his people go, luring worshippers to the trees and taking blood sacrifices on full-moon nights.

You are starting to think he’s as close to being a demon as he is to being a god, but he never hurts you and he doesn’t even growl anymore when you have to touch his braced limbs.  He lets you clean him off when he starts to smell like unwashed animal and sweat, and after you bug him for a few days he even lets you undo the matted plait in his hair and take the worst of the knots out of it.  He makes strange, soft noises when you comb your fingers through it and twist it back into its braid, turns his head and nudges against you and you blink for a while, mystified, and then scratch behind his ears. 

He flops his entire weight down on your legs ( _OW_ ) and goes limp.

It seems to make him feel good and it’s relaxing for you, and somehow it becomes a tradition for him to pull himself out of his cave and drop his head into your lap when you’re trying to meditate.  He picks at your leaves absently sometimes, like he’s trying to return the favor—until he finds out that the ones he ‘accidentally’ plucks out regrow instantly, at which point you have to start smacking him away because he finds that trick  _far_ too amusing and the last thing you need as the nights grow longer is a big balding patch of young leaves shriveling in the cold.

The humans harvest.  They leave traditional lavish offerings in the forest and you bring it back to that cave and stream and start a fire and you and Gamzee eat like lords under the falling red leaves.

And then one day, with the sun setting weak and gold through the trees and ice in the air, you come back and find him waiting for you, sitting up outside of his cave.

“Sorry I took so long,” you tell him, and dump a sacrificed wicker basket of rabbits and a sheaf of mulberry branches heavy with berries on the ground.  “There are  _horses_ running through my forest, the mountain god over in the south is missing the forest spirit for those trees on the slopes—” he’s just staring at you.  “…what?”

_Come over here_

“Can it wait?” you grumble, and reach out for the first rabbit.  They even cleaned it for you, sometimes you love having believers.  “I was going to start dinner—”

_Come here_

_I need you to look on me._

_…please_

You have no idea what’s going on, but he said please.  You shrug and nod, drop the rabbit back in the basket and come over to settle down in front of him.  He looks jumpy—you’ve gotten very good at reading his strange face, and you can see the nervousness in his eyes. 

“Okay I’m here,” you say, and nudge one cloven hoof with your bare foot.  “What’s so important you can’t wait till after we eat?”

He doesn’t say anything.  He just takes a deep breath, and…

…and he changes.

His flat, goat-skull face shifts and morphs and the golden-red of his eyes lightens to pure, light gold.  The purple rings widen and the gold around his pupils shrinks to a thin ring.  The fangs recede as his mouth changes, half-hidden behind scarred lips, and his ears shrink, half-vanishing under his hair.  He blinks his strange new eyes at you and rubs a hand over his mouth, feeling out the new shape.

“… _different,_ ” he rasps, very quietly, and his voice out loud is so different from the voice you’re used to in your head you almost don’t comprehend that it’s him talking for a second.  “… _told…dn’t…usually…like that…_ ”

Great rotting hell.  “I,” you say, coherently. He’s looking at you, and after getting used to the minute changes of his still, unreadable face, it’s odd to see him look so nervous and hopeful and strange.  His noise is a little shorter, a little less flattened, but still flat and dark.  His fangs are still long and sharp, but smaller, over dark lips.  For a second you don’t know why his eyes look so different and then he frowns at you, worried, and you notice his strange, round, purple-gold eyes have short, thick eyelashes now, and under the hair that hangs in his eyes he has eyebrows.  It’s bizarre how much difference that makes.  “—I, uh…wh…what?” 

He tries to talk again and flinches, half-raising a hand towards his throat. 

_I told you I didn’t usually carry a look so bent for terror_

_FACE OF FEAR AND FRENZY AND SACRIFICE_

_My god face_

_HAD TO KNOW I COULD LAY TRUST IN YOU BEFORE I LET IT GO AGAIN_

_Came back to what I look on when I see that other me in the water_

_FACE NOBODY KNOWS BUT ME_

_And now you_

He sort of smiles at you, but he’s had that lipless, leering face on for a long time now and the smile comes out sort of rusty and crooked.  It still makes your chest seize up.

“So this….this is what you actually look like?”

“ _Other one’s…like…mask,”_ he explains, still in that small, rusty voice—he winces and rubs his throat with one hand, frowning _._

_Rotting hells that hurts_

“You should keep talking out loud,” you tell him firmly, and he groans and gives you the wide, sad eyes.  “—no, don’t do that.  You need to keep talking and get your throat working again.  I’ll help fix it when it hurts, you’ll be fine.   I…” your chest is locking up again, all strange and hot on the inside like it always seems to be when he does something unexpected like this.  “…I’m…you’ve never shown anybody else—?”

He shakes his head and then coughs and says, quiet and croaky, “… _y’r…special._ ”

You sniff and your eyes are maybe prickling strangely and okay maybe your face is going red, nobody can prove anything.  He makes a coughing, rasping noise—it softens and smooths and oh.  So that’s what his laugh sounds like. 

“…come here,” you say, and lay a hand on his throat—and it’s stupidly touching that he just  _lets_ you.  Then again, you’d find almost anything he did right this second stupidly touching.  You forget about being touched when you close your eyes and concentrate on his throat though—you can feel the knotting and the rawness.  He keeps swallowing, trying to soothe the dry ache, and the cramps keep tightening.

He sighs as you reach in and undo the knots, like straightening a warped branch, and he gasps a little and coughs and then sighs in relief.  It’s strange to hear him sigh without the whistle of his breath through his fangs. 

“Karkat,” he says, and your stomach clenches up tight inside you.  You want…

…you don’t know what you want.  You feel…like you feel about your forest, this bone-deep defensiveness, a part of you, a need to fix and protect.

You shove that feeling as hard as you can to the back of your mind.

“Yes?”

He grins at you.

“I just wanted to say it,” he says, and leans down from his towering height to bump his forehead against yours. “Let a brother get introductions on—for real, for hearing.  Karkat.”

You eat your dinner with his shoulder pressed against yours and the firelight strange on his new face, and you fall asleep to the sound of his voice mumbling drowsy in your ear.


	4. the forest dies in winter

He’s different, with the new face on. 

Not just because he has lips and eyelashes and eyebrows now, although that helps a lot—after all that time learning to decipher his expressions without them, now he’s as easy to read as the lines of your own palms.  But he’s also…different.  More reasonable, less proud.  He laughs more.  He used to have to bow down, almost kneeling, to fit under the low ceiling of his cave—now he just has to bend his head a little to walk under it with you.  He heals faster, too—you feel his leg mend more in a week than it has for the last five. 

But he’s also weaker.  He never showed a sign of chill before he changed; now he shivers when he thinks you can’t see him and huddles more and more inside his cave.  Hibernation time is coming for you and he is going to be far from his people’s tents and fires.  You worry about him.

He starts asking you to take the braces off his arm and leg.  “I got things to deal with,” he tells you, “—I have to pay something back.”  You jolt his arm and he winces—you let him go and raise your eyebrows at him and he growls and gives up.  But he asks again, and again.

Finally you’ve had enough.

“Look,” you tell him, and he crosses his arms and glowers at you.  “I don’t know where you came from except you’re from the other side of my forest.  Even I can’t cross my forest in less than a week and I can _taste_ the snow coming.  You’re not even completely healed yet, I’m not letting you drag yourself across my land through the snow and break your leg again!  You remember what that felt like, right?”

He nods.  He’s sulking again, even though he knows it doesn’t do him any good. 

_I know_

Oh, he’s talking straight into your head again even though he’s got a perfectly functional mouth.  That’s cute. 

“Quit sulking,” you instruct him firmly, and then glance up abruptly at a soft, icy sting on your cheek.

Tiny, pure white snowflakes are drifting through the barren trees.  They bite and burn where they touch your wings; you fight the urge to fold them tight and cringe, and spread them out instead, gritting your teeth.  Better to get this over with faster than slower.  You just wish the first snow of winter could have been heavier.

“What are you doing?” Oh, he’s given up brooding for the moment, that’s nice.  You open your mouth to say something sarcastic and then just go “ _Gnhnnahgh_ ” when a really big flake lands right at the crook where your wing joins with your back.  The blood-red web hisses softly and melts away, turns black and skeletal like the skeleton of a long-dead leaf. “—what’s—Karkat— _”_

“I’m fine.”

“But—”

“I’m _fine._ ” You take a few deep breaths, and manage to get yourself back under control.  “…this is normal, okay.  This is just something that— _hhh_ —hhas to happen.  The forest dies in winter.”

“—dies—?!”

“I’m not actually going to die, you idiot.”  _Ow._ “Just the…the leaf parts, the forest parts—” You flex your wings—it aches, but the skeletal sections fold and bend.  As healthy as you could expect. “—you don’t have to look at the—red anymore.  Haha.”

He doesn’t look happy about it.  “—uh.” He sort of fidgets.  It’s hilarious—he has to be at least an arm’s length taller than a normal human and he’s just standing there kind of shuffling his feet. “…can’t I, like…anything I can do?”

“You just…” you shudder again— _ow._   “—just stay over there, I just need…to…”

You close your eyes and concentrate on taking a deep, steady breath, and then jump about a mile when something touches your face.

His hands are strange and cold on your skin—he’s always colder than you, even though you’re a fall spirit—but not as cold as the ice on your wings and you lean into the sensation and let it distract you.  He touches your skin very, very carefully, across your cheeks and eyelids and the bridge of your nose, like he’s afraid he’s going to hurt you worse if he does more than that, and the cold, tickling touch makes you shiver and sort of half-laugh at the same time.  The pain is falling away as your wings die and harden. Little flares of pain are still dancing up and down your spine—it feels like the sound of bells, sharp and high and almost sweet.  You lean your face into the crook of his shoulder, the knotted line of a scar, and let him soothe you.

After an endless time, you lean back and breath out. The leaves on your head and the back of your neck don’t hurt like your wings do, but you run your fingertips over them and you can feel they’re black and dead as well, skeletal.  Your wings are like black spiderwebs. They ache.  But you take a little pleasure, like you do every winter, in the fact that forest spirits across the land are feeling the same thing.  This is the one time of year your wings don’t mark you as a freak, and you’re no more flightless than anyone else. 

Gamzee is staring at you like he expects you to fall over dead any second. He seems to have forgotten completely about the argument you were just having—which is good, because you don’t feel up to fighting him over this right now.  It’s like the sting of the snow set something off in your head; you’re so tired all of a sudden.  You just want to slump back over on him and close your eyes again.

You force yourself to stay sitting up instead, and not think about that unsure, too-delicate touch across your face…

…wait.

You reach out and clutch clumsily at his wrists; he lets you pull his hands over and stare at his fingers.  “Did you…” you squint.  Focusing is hard.  “…you changed your hands.” 

He looks at his fingers too; they’re long, thin, pointed and humanoid, and the strange, dark, hooflike callouses are gone from his fingertips.  “—didn’t want to hurt you,” He says.  He flexes them; they harden and then soften again, grow claws that melt away into thick, blunt nails.  You watch, hypnotized, and then realize your mouth is hanging open stupidly and close it. 

“Wow,” you say.

You fall over on him.

The world moves slow after that.  Half-frozen-river slow, growing-tree slow. You curl up your wings around you and go hard and still, and things move in long surges of cold distance; the low, soft heartbeat of winter.

Sometimes, there’s a fire.  Sometimes there’s someone talking.  Someone singing.  A high, sweet noise like a bird cry or whistling wind.  There’s distant shrieking of blizzards and there’s snow.  Always, there’s snow.

And then there’s rain.

The first time you realize you’re awake, there’s a fire lit and thunder booming somewhere far away.  Your wings are still wrapped around you and you’re curled up inside them like a cocoon.  You try to move and hiss softly under your breath—there are rough, creaking aches all through you.

You turn your head, one grinding little twist at a time.

You’re in the cave— _Gamzee’s cave_ , your mind supplies fuzzily.  There’s rain pouring down on the low stone roof, a thin trickle of smoke like an upside-down river flowing up the slanted slab of rock and out.  There’s a deer skin hung at the entrance of the cave, and another heap of skins in the corner—

The pile of pelts shifts and groans quietly as you watch.  And you see a dark-toed bare foot and realize with a jolt that the shape you thought was a smooth grey river-rock stuck in the wall of the cave is the curve of one of Gamzee’s shoulders.  His horns are a soft glint of reddish gold in the firelight, and his face is slack and tired and strangely worn. 

You want to crawl over and curl up next to the fire with him.  You want to do stupid things like wake him up every morning and keep him from ever having to look that tired and upset again.  Make sure he doesn’t hurt himself.  Make sure he doesn’t hurt anything else. He's a wild god, less than a stone's throw from you, he’s probably eaten the flesh of hundreds of humans, half-dead and badly injured he still managed to crush a swathe of destruction through your forest, he’s proud and easily angered and he could probably kill you with no more effort than it would take for you to grow a sapling.

And you want to take care of him.

You twitch at the thought and groan as much from the ache in your joints as from the embarrassing presumption—take care of him, right.  Once he’s healed he’ll be a hundred times more capable than you of taking care of himself.  Hells, right now you can’t even take care of yourself—you can barely move.  You’ve got nobody to take care of _you_ , and you’ve always been just fine.

And when he goes again, you’ll be just fine.

With that in mind, you set about the stiff and painful motions of getting yourself unstuck and upright.  You’ve never had this much difficulty waking up after winter before; you suspect the fires Gamzee built to keep himself from freezing made a mess out of your natural cycle of hibernation, and you’re angry at him for all of about three seconds before you imagine him huddled next to the fire watching you lie there in stasis, worrying at his lip and shivering and scared for you, and the anger slips out of your hands like water.  Damn him. 

You get your legs under you and manage a sort of crooked kneeling position; the side of you that was closer to the fire is slightly more flexible, but the opposite leg won’t straighten, and you just sort of kneel there, skewed and stiff, breathing hard. 

A quiet noise echoes around the cave and you jump—and make a wordless, choked noise as every muscle in your body protests.  Gamzee jumps as well, and then yelps as his horns scrape the side of the cave.  You both sit there and shudder, groaning for a few seconds, and then he raises his head and stares at you like he can’t believe his eyes.

“ _Hhhnnnhhh,_ ” you say accusingly, “— _kkkhhhhh._ ”

Wow.  You swallow a few times, painfully, and take a few deep breaths.  He jerks forward and pulls himself over towards you, ears pinned back, reaching out but not touching you, like he’s scared he’s imagining you.  Your chest creaks and groans as you let the air back out and try again.

“… _sssss’lll…hhh--hhere?_ ”

“I—yeah,” he reaches out and touches your face—you imagine him doing that when you were frozen, how your skin must have been as cold and hard as sleeping roots.  You should have warned him.  “You okay?  I…you…”

“ _Mmm._ ”  You start to straighten up a little; he jolts forward like he thinks you’re going to fall and you glare at him.  You can turn your head without your neck catching, now—you bend your arms and flex them again, working the knots out. “— _told you…_ I wasn’t…g’n…die—“

He doesn’t answer, and you glance up at his face.  He’s…staring at you.  Just staring.  He looks like someone stabbed him in the guts and he’s very pale and a lot thinner than you remember and you wonder how much he’s gotten to eat while you were hibernating—your chest twinges horribly.

“…sorry,” you say, and you really do mean it.  “…didn’t think about…this.  Forgot.  I’ve never…had…” Your throat throbs.  You cough and then almost laugh—you did something totally unexpected and now your throat is knotted up and he’s worrying about you, it’s like his transformation in reverse.  You need a drink.  The rain is slacking off outside, but the sound of the water is still strong and inviting…

You start to get to your feet, numb and wobbly, and he makes an unhappy whining sound and jumps up too, still not daring to touch you.  “No—hey, just—” He hovers over you—he looks ludicrously worried and you snort and wobble forward a few steps.  Gods.  You have to figure out some way of never doing this again. 

“…’m fine,” you inform him, mostly truthfully, and wave him off again—your joints pop from your wrist to your fingertips.  “— _nnngh_.  Fine.  ‘M fine.  Go…go, ahh…go on, ‘ll be right behind you.  Can’t do this w…with you hanging over me.  Go.”

He makes another displeased noise, but you glare as menacingly as you can and make a little shoving motion and he hisses between his teeth and backs away, ducking out of the cave.  He knocks the skin off the mouth of the cave as he goes—grey-white storm light pours in, bringing a gust of wet air with it.

You do manage better without him staring at you and panicking—you bend and stretch and then finally grit your teeth and spread your wings out in the cramped cave.  You flap them once or twice and no, you’re not going to get lift like that, but you send off a strong enough wind it blows out Gamzee’s small fire.  There are little traces of fall-red leaf starting to grow at the roots of them already, covering up the skeletal framework.  You straighten your back and shake out your leaves, and you actually feel up to following him out and facing the chilly new world.  A few hobbling steps toward the light—

And then there’s a howl like a wild animal, an unholy, shrieking roar, and the sun goes dark.


	5. you'll see me by summer

You scramble out of the cave and Gamzee is grown tall and hunched and vicious again, growling--a tearing, visceral sound so deep in his chest it’s humming right through your bones.  There are flickering shreds of black mist snapping and curling around his tense shoulders—you catch the shape of a spiny finger and a thin, flexing web for a split second and realize that his wings are flickering on the bare edge of existence, he’s _that_ angry. 

Then you duck around him and catch sight of what he’s growling at. 

“Nepeta!”

You start forward towards her—but Gamzee sticks a long arm out and shoves you back, still snarling.  Nepeta hisses and bristles and starts to circle him like a predator about to pounce on its prey and Gamzee rears up in front of you and makes another one of his horrible noises, a whining, sneering keen.  His face has flattened and gone feral, lips pulling back away from his fangs, warping his scars.

“Karkat, get away from him!”

**_DON’T YOU TOUCH HIM_ **

“Hey, hey hey!” You spread your dead wings and grow to your greatest height; your trees clash and rattle around you, and both of them jump and stare at you.  “ _Settle down!_   Both of you!”

“He tried to _kill_ me!” Nepeta snarls.

_But I didn’t_

_KILL YOU_

**_DID I_ **

“You tried to _kill_ her?!”

He hisses. 

_I DIDN’T KILL HER._

“I noticed!” You step forward between them, flaring your wings, keeping them apart.  “Tell me what happened.  One at a time.  Nepeta?”

“They caught me when I was out hunting!” You remember how long she’s been gone, the wild horses roaming through your woods on Equius’ orders.  “They took me on the solstice and dragged me in front of their king and they had _him—”_ she points an accusing claw at Gamzee, fur bristling, pupils feral slits, “—try to _beat_ me to death so they could watch!”

Gamzee starts up, growling—you hold up a hand.  “—you’ll have your turn to talk,” you tell him firmly.  “Let her finish.  What happened?”

“He broke my arm!” she says, and holds up her right arm—“—and my leg, he went for my ribs but he missed, and he _got inside my head_ and then he—” she hesitates for a second, and then says, almost confused, “…and then he…pulled his last hit.  We were over by the edge of the circle—I broke out.  I ran.  I’ve been hiding and healing since then.”

_You know what that got me_

_I WAS SUPPOSED TO KILL YOU_

You turn back to Gamzee.

“I don’t suppose you want to change back?” You ask, and he snarls.  “—alright fine.  Maybe just enough you can _talk_? Gods’ sakes. You’re not doing anyone any favors.”

He snaps his fangs, sharp and vicious, but his face shortens a little and his teeth withdraw enough for him to spit, _“—what do you think got me these?”_ he holds up his braced arm—Nepeta hunches, ready to spring at him, and he lowers it again, crouching a little, ready to spring forward.  Gods _dammit_ , this would be so much easier if they would at least stop acting like they’re going to try to kill each other as soon as you get out from between them. “I was supposed to kill you, I was under orders, I was _bound down to those blighted orders_ from the second they caught you!  **_HE_** _broke me like I broke you and whipped me hard and_ threw me away _!  WHY DO YOU THINK WE WERE CLOSE TO CIRCLE’S EDGE—?!_ “

_WHY DO YOU THINK THAT LAST STROKE MISSED YOU_

**_WHY DO YOU THINK THAT BLOW FELL SHORT_ **

“Gamzee!” 

He takes a few deep breaths and settles back down.  His wings had been coalescing as he got angrier; they vanish into the air again and he just glares at both of you. 

“That’s why your arm and leg were broken?”

No answer.  He looks more stubbornly resentful than he has since the first time you met him, ears flattened, eyes narrowed, expression thunderous.  You rub at your forehead, but it does nothing to shake the headache throbbing in your skull. 

“Right.  Okay.” You turn to Nepeta, who looks confused and suspicious and still angry.  “—right arm, left leg?”

“Yes.”

You glance back at Gamzee and sigh, then take her by the shoulder and lead her away from where he’s slouching. 

“… _when I found him he had a broken arm and a broken leg_ ,” you murmur, and she hisses softly, unconvinced.  “—he was covered in blood, it…did _look_ like he’d been whipped.  Nepeta, I think he’s seriously in exile.”

“Well…” she bites her lower lip, tail lashing.  “…maybe.  But Karkat, just because he didn’t kill me, that doesn’t make him a good person!” She must catch the look on your face—she narrows her eyes a little, considering you.  “…how long have you been taking care of him?”

“…since the first week of harvest,” you say, and then add, maybe a little defiantly.  “He heals slowly.”

She softens, just slightly.

“…well if he still hasn’t killed you, maybe he really isn’t quite as bad as he looks,” she allows reluctantly. “But even if he did…what he said…I don’t owe him anything.”

“Fair,” you say, and she nods.  “Just…make sure Equius knows what happened, okay?  His servants have been trampling through my forest looking for you.  And don’t let him know who I’m taking care of…?”

“He wouldn’t take that well,” she agrees, and sighs.  “He’s been trampling all over your land, hasn’t he?  I’m sorry.”

You can’t really deny that, so you don’t try.  She sighs.

“I’ll go calm him down.  See you around, Kar… _kat_.” She giggles a little on that word—she loves saying your name, and it should bug you but it doesn’t, not nearly as much as it should.  You wave her off and she throws one last sharp look back at Gamzee and then she’s gone into the trees.  She’s faster than you’d ever be, even flying. 

There’s silence for a long, long time after Nepeta is gone off into the woods.  Gamzee shrinks slowly back down, from almost twice as tall as you to only a head or two taller, legs straightening, his features becoming slowly more and more human.  He still won’t look at you, but that just means you have a clear view of the scars on his back.  You remember how disdainful he was of you when you first found him, like he could kill you without a twinge of conscience.  What the hell would make him pull a killing blow?

You’re about to say something, maybe try to ask, when he raises his braced arm, holding it out towards you.  He clenches his hand into a fist—his arm flexes; the wood creaks, and he barely winces.

_Take these off_

“—but—”

His hand twitches and jerks, his fingernails sharpen to claws.  He’s not in a mood to argue, and you know you can’t tell him he’s not healed enough yet.  Pushing him now is going to take him to the snapping point. 

You swallow hard and take the arm he’s giving you. The brace has already lived long past its normal life as wood; you release it, and it shrivels and rots in seconds, falling away from his arm and leg as he grows back to his second form, his ‘god face’.  It makes something hot and horrible bloom in your chest and he doesn’t even _look_ at you as he starts to turn toward the South, takes a step—he’s not even going to say goodbye, this is _it—_?

“Wait—!”

He turns a little, still not looking straight at you.  Frowns.  He doesn’t have a mouth that works anymore, but what you can see of his thin face says enough, even turned away from you.

“…don’t go.”

_I have to_

_YOU KNEW I WOULD_

_What did you think I would do_

_STAY HERE AND NEVER RETURN TO THEM_

_Never face them to serve my dishonor_

_YOU DO NOT DICTATE MY COMING AND GOING_

_This is something I have to do_

“I know you…you think you do, but—”

_But_

_WHAT_

He’s baring his teeth now, bristling and you should drop it but there’s a terrible, jagged _need_ inside you and you grab his wrist—he starts to jerk away, snarling but that just sends a spike of desperation through you and you blurt out, “— you can’t go!  You’re my—!”

And then you stop, opening and closing your mouth, lost, because you don’t know what he is.  What you are to him, what he is to you, what you are to each other and what you _want_ to be to him, and he’s looking at you like he did when you forced his broken leg straight, seasons ago—like you’ve hurt him, like he’s _angry_ with you.

_Your what_

**_YOUR_ **

_WHAT_

_That what this has been_

_ALL ALONG WHAT YOU WANTED_

_A pet god_

_A GOD ON HIS BACK_

**_YOURS_ **

“No, you don’t—I don’t—!” You can’t figure out what it is you _do_ want, and it’s so frustrating, not being able to say what you mean, because you’re _always_ able to say what you mean.  “I just want—!”

**_WHAT_ **

“I just want to keep you _safe!_ ”

The words hang in the air, and your wings are flared out and twitching, your face is the same color as your leaves.  He stares at you, mouth hanging open.

… _what_

“…I want…to be…yours,” you say slowly, and the words feel _right_ even as they make no sense.  “I want to be yours, and I want…I want to keep you safe, I just…I want to _have_ you, but not like that, like you…just…” you reach out to the air, hold on to something invisible—you don’t know what you’re reaching for, but you bring your hands back and they press against your chest, against the pound of your heartbeat through your skin.  Your throat hurts, your throat feels…strange.  Tight.  “… _I don’t want you to go_.”

He bends down a little bit, shrinks, wings melting away like illusions in the fog, and he comes close to you again.  You flinch a little, remembering how he just snarled at you and how angry his voice inside your head felt, but he just leans down close and bumps his forehead against one of your stubby horns.

“ _Oh, best friend_ ,” he says in your ear, and wraps an arm around your shoulders.  “ _I’ll be okay._ ” He’s cold.  He’s still limping a little bit, his right hand trembles on your shoulder and he still winces when he bends his fingers to comb his rough-calloused fingertips over your scalp.  He’s barely even healed yet, you shouldn’t let him go.

But you can’t stop him.

“ _What if you aren’t?_ ” You mumble, and he does that huffing sigh that means you’re being stupid.  You aren’t being stupid, it’s _scary_ , it’s scary and for once in your life, growth blight him, you can’t shrug off the fear or fix it yourself.  This is why you never get attached, this is why you don’t care about people, because you can’t control them and it hurts and you’re _scared_.  “You idiot, last time you barely dragged yourself here, you would have _died_.”

_Last time I was a child_

“I was too proud for him.”

_He thought it would teach me a lesson._

“I learned my lesson.” He nuzzles at your hair, lifts you up a little bit off the ground to bundle you up in his great, long arms, and you wrap your wings and arms around him and hold on. “He don’t have to know he wasn’t the one who taught it.”

Oh gods and beings, you’re going to cry like a human child.  You bury your face in his shoulder and his skin is cool and scarred and the soft, half-there billow of his wings closes around you.

You don’t know how long he holds on to you, but after a long while, and he lowers you back down. You didn’t cry, if anyone asks you you’re going to beat the shit out of them, but your eyes are horrible and swollen and your chest still hurts. “I’ll be okay,” he tells you again, and doesn’t quite take his hands off of you, not yet. “I’ll just go and come back.  Brother.” He tips your face up and nudges his flat nose against yours. “—you’ll see me back by summer.”

“I’d better.” You still don’t want to let go—but it’s not your job to take care of him.  It’s _not_.  He feels like he has to do this, and you should let go of his hand.

You’re going to let go of his hand.

You look at each other, and then at the exact same second you look back down, take the same long, slow breath, and let your hands fall.

“…get going,” you tell him, like you’re not absolutely terrified.  “…just, don’t…” _go back to who you were, don’t rot, don’t_ die _—_   “…don’t do anything idiotic.  Okay?”

He tosses his head—flicks his braid over one shoulder and sneers at you in a mocking imitation of the arrogance he showed when you first found him.  His wings are forming again, solidifying, and now that you're not crying on him anymore you see them as they are for the first time; they’re huge, black like his hair and leathery as bat wings. 

_You would command a_

_GOD_

“Oh for growth’s sake.” You swat at him, and the stupid, helpless laughter chases out some of the dull pain in your chest, the foreboding.  “Get a move on.  Find shelter after dark, and _don’t pick any fights._ ”

He crinkles his round purple-gold eyes in a smile, crouches, spreads his wings…

…he’s gone in a gust of cold evening air, vanishing into the cold storm sky.

You can’t follow him, but your useless wings wrap around you like they can keep you warm, and you wish you could.


	6. stay in at night

You miss him. 

Missing him is possibly the stupidest thing you have ever done, and you know it.  He was violent and proud and he got angry over idiotic things for no reason and calming him down when he was upset was a pain.  He was a human-eater and he almost beat one of your best friends to death for entertainment.  He ate a ton of food, played pipes late at night and messed up your hibernation cycle. 

You know all of this, but you miss him anyway, because you’re stupid and he was stupid and he was getting _better_ and he stayed with you through the winter and he held you when you got angry and curled up next to you when you were tired.  He makes it far, far too easy to miss him.

You get angry at him for making him miss you, then he’s not there to mess with your leaves and calm you down, and that makes you sad again.  Leaves you sitting around thinking up maudlin comparisons, _like the forest misses springtime,_ _like life misses death, like I miss_ him _goddammit—_ it’s pathetic. 

You bring home more meat than you need by accident, catch yourself about to light fires you don’t need, and you miss him like a pathetic chump.  Another human festival comes around; the humans give you excellent offerings and you’re morose enough you can’t bother to be angry with them, so instead you give them flowering trees and gardens and watch from the outskirts of the forest as they ooh and ahhh over the colors. 

Gamzee would like those flowers too, blight him.

You’ve never had a place you always return to before, but this is another side effect of your pointlessly vague, deep-set longing—you spend your extra time at the mouth of the cave, growing grass and flowers and tree roots up over it slowly, making mockeries of the humans’ ‘stained glass windows’ with your flowers and outdoing their architecture with arching, woven branches. 

Word starts to spread; as the spring eases towards the growing seasons the humans gather in your clearing, murmuring and staring around at the woven walls and the flower-hung treetops, leaving offerings at the bases of the little trees that sprang up before the winter came.  An actually very accurate rumor springs up that this is the cave where you sleep in the winter, and an entirely bizarre rumor that this is where you once impregnated some ancient human who founded their town.  You blight the farms of people who spread that rumor until people begin to notice a pattern and stop telling stupid stories.

…you have no real excuse for the flowers.  They’re a vanity.  But they keep your mind occupied, and the forest grows peacefully as the sun arcs higher and hotter over the trees.

You’re sitting there in the treetops one day, listening to the whispers of your trees and your worshippers, when someone yells. 

That’s not a thing that often happens—whatever else making this place has done for you, it has reduced the amount of yelling and stomping around that humans do in your presence—and you sit up and open your eyes just in time to see your worshippers run screaming out of the grove as a swarm of stinging hornets and bumblebees whirr towards them and herd them away. 

Oh.  It’s _him._ You refuse to do him the courtesy of getting up or greeting him, so instead you settle stubbornly back, cross your arms and close your eyes again.

“Karkat!”

…well, if he’s going to yell first.

You turn grudgingly and swing your legs over the branch you’re sitting on, looking down at the now-almost-empty clearing.  Sollux is still reconstituting, a blur of gold and jet-black chitin and humming, buzzing energy, but he’s already turned to look up at you, grinning.  He looks in an uncommonly good mood.  You loathe him for it.

“What do you want?!” You yell down, and he shakes his head as the last few whirring black and yellow bodies melt into his skin. 

“You should have told me you were having a feast!” he calls back— _feazzzzzt_.  Heh.  He still can’t talk.  “You never did flowersss before, KK, what’s up?” 

The bees that aren’t part of his corporeal form scatter across your clearing, and you feel the distant tickle of their life on the petals of your flowers.  It’s strange how distant and impartial and yet intimate that feeling is, so you ignore it.

“What, I can’t do a little shock and awe for the mortals?” You call down, and he shrugs his bony shoulders. 

“Shock and awe izzz one thing, KK, flower castles are totally different thing!  Get down here!”

You rolls your eyes, but slide forward off the branch and drop down.  The tree roots whip up to meet you, and carry you down to the ground slowly until your feet settle onto the earth as gentle as a butterfly on one of your flowers.  It used to be a strain to do that, but you’re stronger now, bizarrely strong.  You feel terrible, and great, and mostly just confused, but you could make a tree pull its roots out of the ground and dance like a human without breaking a sweat.  You feel strong.

Sollux lets you settle to the ground before he starts clapping sardonically, and you take a break from feeling pleased with yourself to bite your thumb at him and then swat his bees away from your face. 

“So,” says Sollux, “—I heard you had a visitor.”

You don’t dignify that with an answer—which might not be your smartest option, because that makes him smirk like you’ve confirmed his suspicions. 

“Nepeta didn’t say who,” he says.  “—where’s your mystery… _friend_ …at?  I want to zzzzee whoever can make KK grow flowers all over his drab-as-hells forest.”

“I’m not making them for him!” you snap, incensed, and he wiggles his eyebrows at you until you feel your face turn dirty brownish-red.  “Shut up.”

“FF says when she sees a domain change like this it means you’re in love.”

“Sollux.”

“She’s seen you on the sea-border looking all contemplative.”

“ _Stop_.”

“Come on, where is he?”

“I’m not—!”

“KK, just spit it out!”

“He’s _gone_!”

It’s been weeks but you haven’t said it yet, and saying it feels like tearing something inside you.  You’re breathing harder than you should be, heart beating fast and stupid and almost human-strong in your chest.  Sollux has been buzzing with glee, flying high—he goes still.  Stares at you.

“…oh,” he says.  “…oh.  I’m.  Uh…shit.  Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“No it’s not.”  He’s buzzing again, but not happy this time.  You recognize the tight set of his scrawny shoulders and the downturn of his fangy mouth—shit, not again.  “I messed up, gods damn it—I’m such a—”

“Sollux.”

He takes a deep breath or two and drags his hands down his face.  Flakes of chitin crumble away where his nails score the plates on his cheeks—wasps, buzzing in circles around his head before morphing back into him and healing away the scratches. 

“Okay,” he says finally.  “so…I guess you’re not…happy, then.”

“Not really,” you say, even drier than you meant to, and he winces.   “—I’m just sprouting flowers all over the place.  Just for the hell of it.  Why not?  I mean, it would make him happy, I bet, he likes colors—liked.  He.  Liked colors.  Would have had to keep him from eating people who showed up here, though, it would have been a pain, that enormous ass.  I’m—glad.  He’s gone.”

“Yeah, right,” he says, but he doesn’t push you about it.  You were angry at how happy he was, but you’re angrier about the way he’s slumped down now, crumpled up like a withered leaf. 

“…well,” you say finally, when he has nothing else to say, “—are you gonna take advantage of the endless goodness of my heart or what?  Get your stripy rear ends in the air and pollinate some flowers.”

“Yeah, fine,” he says, and at least he stops hunching.  You punch him in the shoulder and it feels weird how he almost-sort-of gives way under the pressure, like he’s going to scatter, then solidifies again when you take your hand away.  He looks less upset, though.  This is familiar earth. “…that’s not why I’m here though, KK.”

“You just _said_ —”

“No I said I saw your flowers and thought it was weird and then I messed up and said a bunch of shitty things,” he cuts you off.  “—that’s not why I’m here.  You never come to caucus, so they sent me all the way over here to tell you there’s a lot of trouble down South on the forest’s edge.  Something’s stirred up down there.”

“Why is that any of my business?”  ( _That’s the direction Gamzee went, that’s where he went—_ )  “Equius cuts off anything that comes from the south, you’ve seen his whole _I AM GOD OF THIS MOUNTAIN, THIS MOUNTAIN REMAINS STRONG AND UNSURPASSABLE_ routine—”

“Equius didn’t come to caucus either.”

That takes you a second.  You think you heard him wrong, but he just stares at you, perfectly serious, and nods. That’s…not right.  If there’s one thing Equius never does it’s miss a caucus, he always comes through to glower at you and make barely-veiled attempts at ordering you to go.  He didn’t…he didn’t come through this year, did he?  And you were so busy moping and growing flowers, you didn’t even notice.

“He…no, he always—”

“Yeah, I know.”  Sollux hisses through his teeth—really more of a buzz—and shakes his head.  “—he hasn’t been around.  The humans have even noticed, they’re praying to everything they’ve ever believed in and staying in at night.  And if the mortals sense something is wrong, there’s something _seriously_ wrong.  And.  You’re the next closest to the forest border.  So just…” he hesitates, already dissolving into thousands of tiny, buzzing shapes.  “…juzzzzzt…take care of yourzelf.”

And then he whirls away, and the swarm he gathered to host him buzzes aimlessly off to your flowers.

It’s the same summer morning it ever was, but somehow overhead, the sun seems dimmer, and when you look out over the empty southern mountains, there’s an empty chill like winter in the air.  


	7. gods and great good spirits

The days grow colder.  Darker.  It doesn’t feel like fall—and it’s too early anyway, far, far too early for autumn.  Dark clouds boil up from the south, and when rain falls from them your trees groan and your flowers shrivel and crumble.  Sollux’s bees stop coming.  Everyone stops sending messages, huddling in the centers of their own territories, and you know from the prickling on the edges of your senses that they’re raising barriers, setting up defenses.  You don’t blame them—you’re isolated, you never talk to hardly anyone, but even you can feel it.

Something is wrong.

You grow trees in shapes of protection and repulsion at the borders of your forest, you watch your worshippers lock their doors and close their windows at night.  They can feel when you’re unsettled.  They have senses as dull as a rusty blade, but they’re not completely blind, and all the brilliance you spent all spring making throughout your forest has died in less than a week. 

You do all you can and then, as the clouds loom right at the border of your forest, you settle down, as prepared as you will ever be, and you wait.

…and then, the next morning, they’re gone.  

Whatever force was spreading them, far down in the South past the mountains, it…snaps.  You feel it, late in the afternoon; something howls, rings through your spirit more than your ears, and then the clouds seem to shiver like a field of wheat in a sudden gust of high wind.  Less than an hour later, the clouds have melted away.  The forest is bright with sunlight.

You watch a red and orange and purple-blue sunset, not a single dark cloud in sight, and you wonder.

\--

The night is silent, once the sun goes down.  You walk your forest’s border for a little while, unbending some of the trees that you shaped for protection.  Not all of them—but the ones left should be able to deal with any spirit that might have a grudge on you bad enough to come all the way up here in person.  You actually go up to the edge of your town and look down over your humans, and for some reason their stupid pale, ghostly faces stir something up in you, something deep down and old and fierce.  They’re idiots, but they’re yours.  They’re gone as fast as cold autumn mist, but they’re yours while they’re here.  You’re…you think you might actually be _glad_ that nothing is going to happen to them. 

It’s been a few hundred years since your humans moved in and started populating these little clearings and planting their little fields on the edges of the trees, and you only just realized that you don’t mind having them there.  God, you blame Gamzee for all of this, this is obviously all his fault.  (It’s easier than realizing that you already depended on them, cared about them even, that when something came into your forest from outside to prey on humans your own self-interest wasn’t the only reason that you drove it out.)

You’re crossing back through the forest again from branch to branch, thinking about humans—offerings and how they looked up at your trees when you grew flowers, little human sprouts and their half-formed prayers of thanks for your bounty—when something twinges inside you, sharp like a wasp sting.  You stop, flinching; it wasn’t any actual part of your body that hurt, you take stock and feel around for the pain and you find it in the part of you that is outside of yourself, in the trees and the ground.  Something is hurting your forest.

You turn, closing your eyes, feeling for it, and hear something in the distance—a low rumble, like thunder.  An eerie, echoing kind of noise, high and wailing.  You wince again as a jolt of pain goes through you—something is hurting your forest, the wood is breaking and the ground is shaking.  It feels like…a stampede?  Hooves pounding, getting closer and—

The branch you’re standing on twists and groans and rots out from underneath you.  Something swats you out of the air and slams you into a tree trunk so hard you and the tree both go _crack_ and you see a whirl of feral, stony-grey faces and wild hair full of beads, feathers, bones. 

The wild gods are _huge_.  There has to be at least two dozen of them, trailing dark wings behind them like smoke, cackling and whooping as they crush your forest out of their way—filthy, sweaty bodies, matted ropes of hair, bright painted colors and massive, thundering hooves.  One of those hooves slams into your leg as you struggle to get back to your feet and there’s a _crack_ as you break like dry timber.  It doesn’t even seem to notice it hit you, but then you let out a single tiny, pained noise and one of them pauses and looks down at you.  The shape of its face, its flattened nose, sneering mouth—it’s different, it’s not him, but it’s so horribly _familiar_.

It calls out something inside your head, a jagged howl of words you don’t understand, and they turn and slink back towards you, hunched and leering, and you try to get to your feet again and stagger onto your knees—your leg won’t bear your weight, your wings are useless as ever, and one of them grabs you by the throat and drags you into the air.  They gather around; the one holding you makes a hissing, burning sound, and all of them shiver and snarl and let out a barking, roaring sound that’s barely a laugh. 

 ** _LITTLE LEAF SPIRIT_** one of them croons into your head, and your whole body jerks and thrashes out of your control, your head throbs.  You didn’t realize how soft Gamzee was keeping his voice, this feels like steel scraping over stone.  **_KEPT A PRINCE_**

**_DIDN’T LET HIM GO_ **

**_KEPT OUR PRINCE AND MADE HIM SOFT_ **

**_LITTLE LEAF SPIRIT WENT AND PUT HIS HANDS WHERE HE OUGHTN’T_ **

One of them grabs your wings in one brutal hand, and you don’t even have time to beg _no please,_ please _gods no_ before there’s a wrenching _crack_ and your entire existence is a howl of agony.  They’re laughing again—the one holding on to you shakes you hard and you claw weakly at its hand but its skin is tough as leather.  One of them lashes out with something—a rough length of weighted cords, you think—it’s strong enough the rope cuts you like blades, tears through your flesh.  It’s a different pain from your wings and the two in combination are terrible enough to drag a terrible noise out of you.  Your broken leg hangs all wrong and your head spins. 

 ** _COME ON LITTLE LEAF_** the one holding you croons, and it grabs your face in one huge hand—shakes you a little again, and you can feel _exactly_ how easy to would be for those fingers to squeeze and snap your neck.  You hadn’t realized you were crying, but there are tears flowing down your face, your breath won’t catch.  Your teeth caught on your lip when it shook you; there’s blood in your mouth. **_DON’T BE ALL DOWN NOW, NOT ALL THIS BLIGHTED WEEPING_**

**_IT’S GROWING FESTIVAL TIME_ **

**_THE SACRIFICES ARE BLEEDING ON ALTARS_ **

** _SMILE_ **

The word is more than an order, it’s a _compulsion_ , it’s wrapped up in old, old magic and it goes straight into the core of you like a white-hot brand.  Something forces its way into your head and it’s heavy and icy and slimy-wet like rotting leaves and rotting corpses—your face twists up into a smile and the face in front of you grins back at you, bares all its fangs and crinkles up its gold-on-black goat eyes.  When the laughter comes it feels like being stabbed, something tearing open your chest, and you hang there and wheeze out horrible, whining, grinding laughs, over and over and over again.  It’s just _so gods-damned funny,_ he—he—he told them where you were.  He told them how to find you.  He told them you’d _kept him prisoner_. 

He told you he’d be back by springtime.

 ** _LEAVE HIM_** howls another voice, and they circle around you, laughing their terrible, barking laughs.  **_WE GOT MORE TO CRUSH BEFORE DAYBREAK_**

The hand around your neck lets you go.  You drop to the ground, slam into the shattered root of a tree and roll to a stop in the cradle of its roots, and they laugh and roar and their hooves make the ground shake under you—

And then, finally, they’re gone. 

You lie where they leave you; you can’t move.  Your trees are shattered, you’re bleeding scarlet, your wings are gone gone gone and you’re still laughing.  As their roars and jeering fade away the forced laughter turns into just noises, shaking jags of sound, and then their sick magic fades out of you and you’re crying instead, sobbing into the churned mud and the dying grass. Somewhere far away you can feel them smashing through your forest, headed South again, back to their churches and their stone circles. 

You don’t know how long you lie there, twisted over on your side, one side of your face pressed into the cool, churned and broken earth.  The forest stays shattered around you, and its pain is all through you—time is immaterial.  _You’re_ immaterial.  You hardly feel real.

The sun burns your face, but your trees are too broken to use its warmth and its power.  You lie in the sun like a dead thing until even your inhumanly tough skin burns, and when the sun sets the tight, hot throb of your side and your back join your pain in your forest and your shattered leg.

And then, after an eternity of silent pain, something _touches_ you. 

You make a wild sound and thrash, but you’re weak as a human and they hold you still with a hand on your burned shoulder.  For a second you think the gods have come back, that they thought better and decided to kill you after all, but you’ve got nothing left to struggle with.  You can only hope they make it fast.  You’ve been drifting—you find that it’s night again, but gods only know how many days and nights its’ been since you were broken. 

“Oh gods and spirits,” gasps a voice—light, female, corporeal in a way only the voice of a human can be.  Your entire body freezes up in shock, you suddenly don’t understand _anything_ at all.  _Human._ You’re being held by a _human._  Your throat is burning with tears, your face is wet—did you ever stop crying?  Have your tears stopped since that night?—your wings are somewhere trampled on the ground or as some satyr-god’s trophy, and a _human_ is holding onto you with warm, solid hands.  “Oh no, um…shh, no _shhhh_ , it’s…it’s alright!”

Your forest is broken and you are betrayed and _nothing_ is alright, and you snap your fangs and sob in weak, pointless jags of breath, tearing at your raw throat.

“Are you the forest spirit?” The human rolls you over a bit, a strong thin little arm under your shoulders—

Her arm bumps the shattered remnants of your wings and it doesn’t hurt but the sense of broken _wrongness_ is worse than agony and you scream like a wild animal, senseless, wordless.  The human gasps.  “—sorry!  I’m sorry, I won’t touch them again, oh no…” a rough, light human hand strokes your leaves, trembling, and slowly, slowly, you settle.  “I didn’t mean to hurt you.  Can…can you talk?” 

( _what happened to you? Are you okay?_ ) ( _I’m going to call you Gamzee.)_ ( _you’ll see me back by springtime…_ )

“Leave me alone,” you hiss at her, breathless and hoarse.

“What—?”

“ _LEAVE ME ALONE!_ ”

You’re weakened but furious, and the power of your voice makes her scream in pain—but she doesn’t let go of you, and the last of your strength drains away.  She doesn’t finish you off, and she doesn’t run away, she just _holds_ you there, rocking you a little back and forth, murmuring _“Shhh, shhh._ I’m not leaving you.  Is there…what can I do to help you?”

( _Is there anything I can get you to help…?_ )

“ _Kill me_ ,” you spit, and in that moment you mean it with all your heart and it is everything you want.  “ _Please—just…_ kill me—”

She gasps softly, and then lets the air out, long and slow.  A little at a time she turns you over, careful of your wings, ignoring the blood on her hands.  And then she’s looking down on you, face to face.

She’s got eyes the color of spring leaves and a waterfall of hair like jet and midnight skies.  She’s got square hands and dirt on her nose and even though she’ll live for a century or less, a handful of years, you look at her and you feel…transient, she’s as solid as the earth.

Oh gods, what’s _wrong_ with you?  You’re dying.  You’re _dying._   That has to be what this is, you are _dying_.

“Do you really want me to?” She asks you, and her eyes are so green and you can see her staring at the bright red of yours.  “Do you want to die?”

“… _no,_ ” you choke, and she smiles.  She has stupid rabbit teeth, she really could kill you right at this second but instead she’s holding you and taking care of you and your chest hurts.

“What happened?” She asks you, and she searches around and picks a few leaves off a half-trampled plant.  When she presses them to your side it burns, but she trickles something from a flask over the leaves and the burn fades to cool numbness.  “They sent for me as soon as it started, but the forest wouldn’t let us in, nobody could bear to get near the trees—do you know what hurt you?  They said it was like watching a hurricane, they saw…shapes, huge, dancing shapes, and there was this _awful_ sound…”

“ _Wild gods,_ ” you rasp, and she helps you sit up a little at a time, avoiding your wings.  “ _Satyr…gods._ ”

“Oh—oh dear,” she says weakly, and her big green eyes widen with realization.  “—wait, then…” she lays you down and your head is on something warm and soft—oh.  Your head is in her lap.  She takes out a bottle of something that smells like ice and throws it out around you in a rough circle.”—that should take care of it if they try to come back,” she says, and caps the bottle, slipping it back in her cloak.  You don’t see where it goes.

“ _Mmngh,_ ” you say, and shift your weight.  ( _Your wings,_ gods _, your wings…_ )  

“You’re welcome,” she says, and goes back to laying leaves and numbing liquid on your lacerated stomach.  “…I’m Jade.  I’m a…well, I suppose you could say I’m a scientist, and a magician, sometimes, and I do some alchemy—” She stops herself when she notices you staring at her, and her face turns a little bit red.  “…and I talk too much,” she says, apologetic, and reaches into her cloak for _another_ little bottle.  “…do you have a name?”

“I…” she runs her hand over your stomach, hip to shoulder, smoothing down her makeshift bandages, and you shake.  Being touched is the worst thing right now, but you don’t know if you’d live if she took her hands away, whether you’d just shatter apart.  “… _Karkat._ ”

“Karkat?” She giggles weakly and smooths a leaf over your cut cheek—you barely feel it burn.  “…that’s a strange name.” ( _FUNNY NAME FOR A FUNNY…spirit._ )

The betrayal and pain are a red-hot lump in your stomach.  You make a quiet noise—you mean it to be a sort of soft, warning growl, _stop talking_ , but it comes out more like a whimper and she returns it with her own human noise of distress and strokes your face again.  It feels good.  It feels stupidly good.  Your eyes fall on where you were lying; where your body was, there’s a nest of soft, green growth, cushioning where you lay.  Where your tears fell, there are tiny, silver wildflowers.  You press a hand to the battered turf of your home and try not to cry.

And then, out in the darkness, something breaks a half-dead branch.

You feel it more than you hear it; your head snaps around, and you stare out into the darkness, searching blindly with the senses you barely have.  The human—Jade—sits up as well, suddenly tense.  “What’s the matter?  Karkat?”

“ _Shh_.”

There’s something big out there, and it’s not an animal of your forest.  Something dark and old.  Something terrible.  You’re shaking and Jade is mumbling to herself and pulling more things out of her cloak, laying down layers of things that make your head spin and your senses waver.  You throw yourself over onto your side and pull yourself to your knees, staring out at the woods around you—the makeshift dressings on your wounds bend with you, crack a little and ooze blood but don’t give way. 

And then there’s a flicker of movement and a massive, burning _flare_ of pure white light.  You yell and jerk away—Jade yells too, but she moves forward.  She draws a long knife made of cold human iron, worked with something that makes you feel sick to be near. 

“Stay back!” She calls out, and the dark spots start to fade away from your vision; there’s something huge outside the circle, like the satyrs that wrecked your forest but even _bigger,_ with huge, clawed hands that could pick you up like a doll and massive, bat-like wings.  It howls with a sound like a thousand screaming animals and batters at the whatever-it-is that’s between it and you, clawing at it and slamming against it with its wings, and there are more of those great flashes of bright white light, blinding.  Jade screams and throws something that explodes, spicy and chemical and burning—you scream as the plants on the ground around you wither and when the thing attacking you screams as well the noise is…horribly, gut-wrenchingly familiar.

Jade draws back her arm to throw another whatever-is-is and you catch her arm.

“ _Wait,_ ” you choke, and when she tries to jerk her hand away you snarl at her and shake her a little.  “— _WAIT._ ”

She freezes.  The light starts to dim—the smoke she made starts to fade away and the ringing in your ears fades as well as the plants reach clean air.  The light of Jade’s lantern casts golden light through the clearing, and casts stark, wavering shadows over the shattered trees.

And over the face of your attacker.

“ _Oh my gods and great good spirits,_ ” murmurs Jade, “…what _is_ that thing?”

The creature crouched outside the circle has hands big enough to wrap around your chest and gut you with one claw.  Its wings are deep, bruised black-violet and its horns  spiral out of its wild mane of hair, heavy and notched and almost as long as your arm.

…and there are three clear, deep scars on its face.

It cocks its head to one side and snarls at you; its eyes are almost pure gold, its pupils are tiny, horizontal slits and there’s no trace of comprehension in its eyes as it snarls at you.  It drags those vicious claws down the invisible wall between you and tosses its head, and you see the scar on the side of its neck, the marks on its sides and shoulders that you cleaned and dressed, that you took care of and worried over…

“Karkat,” hisses Jade—she sounds anxious, fearful, but not terrified.  She’s got guts.  “What’s going on?” 

“Don’t hurt him,” you say, almost dreamy.  “…he’s scared.’

“ _He’s_ scared?!”

“Shhh.”

You crawl forward, as close to the circle as you can bear—it burns at you, being close to it, and you don’t try to touch it, to feel that blazing light for yourself. 

“Gamzee,” you say, as clearly as you can—your mouth tastes like sap and blood.  “Where were you?”

He shudders a little and blinks at you.  Makes another low, rolling snarl, deep, deep in his chest.  His eyes are still blank.

“ _Gamzee._ ”

“Karkat?” Jade whispers.

“ _Shh!_ ”  You glare down at the impassable ground in front of you.  “…break the circle.”

She gasps.  “Are you completely insane?!”

“ _BREAK THE CIRCLE._ ”

“Don’t you take that tone of voice with me!”

“I need to calm him down!”  You slam a fist into the force between you—every muscle in your body knots and tenses with the urge to throw yourself away from it but every fiber of your being is pushing against it, _he’s so angry he’s so scared look at the look in his eyes he wasn’t there with them you would have seen him he didn’t know and now he’s_ scared— “He must have—come—looking for—” you stagger.  Your leg is barely healed enough to stand, but you grow roots up from the ground with all the strength you have and wrap them up to your knee, support yourself on them.  “…he broke in,” you mumble, and sway—the world is spinning.  “Broke my borders, ‘s why it…let you in…”

“Karkat!”

Gamzee lunges forward in a blur of dark fur and white teeth and something dark comes between you and him.  There’s a meaty _thud_.

For a single, breathless moment, utter silence smothers you all, and you can hear a tiny, breathless, choked gasp.  And then Gamzee rears up and howls, and Jade’s limp body is dangling from one of his massive clawed hands, trailing her cloak like a shroud.  He takes a thundering step towards you and sniffs the air around you and you notice something bright red, glowing soft and warm in the light of Jade’s lantern.  One hand holds on to Jade’s body (dead or alive you can’t tell humans are so fragile but you just met her and she was so kind to you she can’t be dead she can’t be dead) but the other one he holds close to him, protective, and in between his fingers you can see folds of brittle red leaf and spindly wood, familiar as your own hands.

He’s got your broken wings in one huge hand, and he stares at you with wide, wild eyes and holds on to them like they’re made of spun glass. 

“Gamzee,” you say, and hold up your hands.  He snorts and tosses his head; his braid is undone and his hair hangs in his face.  He’s wearing paint—or his own blood—smeared across his face and bare chest in wild patterns that hurt your eyes to look at and there’s red, human blood smeared across his mouth and down his chin.  His wings are flexing and flapping, sending gusts of old blood, rotten meat, sweat and wet fur over you.  “Gamzee, it’s okay.  You came back, you found me, you’re okay…”

He _roars_ and lunges forward at you; you stand your ground because you’re too weak to run, and he pulls back again.  Bluffing.  He paces a little in front of you, a circling animal, never taking his eyes off of your face. 

Jade’s body is limp in his huge hand.  You watch her, and see her eyes open a crack, her hands clench and unclench at her sides. 

“Don’t move, Jade,” you say, as calmly as you can, and you take another step forward.  You could reach out and touch him from here, even though every part of you is screaming at you to run; he’s massive, even bigger than the other gods were, and you don’t even come up to his waist.  “Gamzee, put her down.  Put her down now, shhhh…”

He looms down over you, and you come up to his stomach when he kneels, his hand is big enough to wrap around your chest.  He sniffs the air around you and growls low in his chest, but he doesn’t snap at you and both his hands are full.  To snatch at you he’ll have to drop Jade or your wings or both.

“Gamzee,” you say again, because it’s all you _can_ say.  “…shhh…”

You lay a hand on his face.  He goes stiff and still all over, not snapping at you but tight as a bowstring.  His shoulders heave in great, animal breaths, and the hot stench of fresh blood and flesh hit you, so strong your stomach turns.  He’s missing a fang, you notice all of a sudden—under the layers of blood and dirt and hair he’s badly bruised and there are more cuts on his face and his bare arms.  His wings are terrifyingly huge, shadows that block out the faint glimmer of the moon, but one of them isn’t the same shape as the other one—snapped and oddly twisted, warping the web.

“What the hell did you do to yourself this time?”  You ask him quietly, and you dare to move your hand, just up and down, feeling the strange contours of his bones under his skin.  “ _Shhhh_ , you found me.  You’re okay.”

He makes a growling, whining sound in the back of his throat; his fingers loosen on Jade’s body, and she drops a few feet to the ground, lands in some moss, lies perfectly still.  You can see her staring up at the two of you with wide eyes as Gamzee hunches down, his wings slowly folding up, strange, wide eyes easing shut. 

“That’s it…” there’s a _feeling_ to your voice, you don’t know how you’re doing it but you lean into him and sigh out the noise of the forest at peace, the pure sound of leaves rustling in quiet wind, water trickling, things growing and settling back into the earth to embrace the tree roots. 

He growls and struggles for a split second before you lean up and press your foreheads together and hush him one last time and he finally collapses forwards toward you.  His massive claws come up, shaking and delicate, and wrap around your shoulders. 

“ _Show me your face,_ ” you murmur to him, and hope like hell you’ve got the right words.  He’s still snarling, catching himself, snarling again, and you keep your hands on his face as he squeezes you.  “ _Show me your face,_ your _face,_ _show me Gamzee, come on._ ”

You didn’t realize that there was a strange, painful roaring in your ears, or that your heart was beating so fast you could barely breathe, but you notice them by their absence.  All of a sudden you can hear the sounds of creaking wood and your own thundering, easing heartbeat.  You can hear Jade’s stifled breathing. 

Gamzee…diminishes.  No part of him that you’re looking at seems to change, but as you aren’t looking he somehow becomes smaller.  His arms are the right size, smooth and scarred, instead of massive, furred claws.  His legs are thin and silver-skinned when a second ago you would have sworn they were massive, recurved goat’s feet.  His face changes so subtly it might almost be caused by the changing of the moonlight through the trees, but it _does_ change, and his eyes go from gold on black to purple on gold on black to hazy purple on gold. 

He looks at you for a second, wraps his wings around the two of you like a clumsy embrace, opens his mouth like he’s about to say something—

…and collapses on the ground. 

His wings melt away like fog under sunlight, and he just lies on the floor of your forest like a corpse, all bare, blood-daubed skin and wild, unplaited hair.  Your roots let you go as you drop down after him, terrified suddenly that you messed something up—but as soon as you move, whatever you were channeling, whatever certainty or power or whatever it was that got you onto your feet, it drains out of you.  Your strength drains away into the ground, the air, the world rolls and pitches—

And then it goes black.


	8. if i was king

The first thing you’re aware of is pain.

Not pain from any part of you—forest pain, and some part of you tells you  _it’s better than it was_  even though you can’t quite remember yet what ‘it’ was or why it hurt at all.

You manage to get one eye part of the way open; you see a familiar stone-and-dirt ceiling, your flowers hanging from the entrance. The day outside is dark purple-gray, full of the sound of heavy, spattering rain. You’re awake—for now—but all you really want to do is close your eyes and drop back into the blackness you just came out of.

“Karkat?”

You don’t jump, because you’re too tired to move that fast. But you do tense up and then groan in pain. Your trees are cracked, there are new saplings between their roots but they’re not big enough to be your forest yet. Your forest is wounded.

“Karkat,” repeats the voice again, and you realize that your eyes have fallen shut again. You force them open, and you see a round, brown face and round, bright green eyes.

“I’m so glad you’re awake,” says Jade. “I have so many questions!”

You groan, close your eyes, and try to pretend you don’t exist.

“...oooor I could wait a while,” she corrects herself, and you nod and make incoherent grunting noises of appreciation for that idea. “I was worried when you passed out, do you normally do that?”

...you passed out.

You were. In your forest, Jade was with you and then you were...you...were...

Something crucial clicks into place inside your skull—you force yourself to sit up, eyes widening.

“... _g’mzee..._ “

“His claws almost punctured my stomach!” says Jade brightly. “—but that’s okay, I put some sealant on it and stitched myself up, and it’s healing nicely. There’s an aura of power around here, did you know? It’s increasing my usual healing time by at least double!”

“Uh,” you say, and blink up at her. “... _nnh_?”

“Oh, but I suppose you probably want to know more about how  _you’re_  doing!” She picks up something made of worked human metal, holds it up to one eye and squints at you through it. “...your network is clear at least! Waking up seems to have pushed out the last of whatever they did to your spirit.” She grabs your arm, and you barely have time to make a protesting noise before she cuts a little slice into your thumb and catches the bright, red-orange blood in a glass vial with practiced ease. She pulls something in a dark bottle out of her cloak and adds a drop of it to the blood; it turns white and cloudy. “—and no little sickness creatures, either!”

“What—the—”

“Little sickness creatures, they get into your body and cause sickness,” she explains. “—I’m not sure they’d work on you, but I’ve been testing every so often—I’m trying to think of a better word for them! I’ve been going back in the older languages and I think  _microorganisms_  might—oh  _damn_ here I am talking about my research again!”

You have nothing to say to that, but she seems to be writing your half of the conversation in her head, so you just blink up at her in a daze. Her eyes are a really nice color. It looks like grass. Or leaves. There are golden human ornaments hanging from her ears and the green and the gold look nice together. It’s nice. You feel...nice.

Little green and gold flowers start to grow from the room of the cave behind her, hanging around her head as you stare at her in a daze and she keeps talking, all flying hand gestures and excited rabbit-toothed grins.

“—I was worried because for a while there you were, well—dead!” she’s explaining, and you blink at her and just wait for her to explain what she’s talking about. “You died! And then for a little while you stayed that way, but then you started to sort of...crack, and then your skin started to pull away and you were  _inside!_ Inside of _your own skin_! Like, like, like a cicada or something! Your leg was healed and everything, It was the most amazing thing I have ever seen—I made sketches and collected some of the slime that was inside the cocoon—well, your skin, your skin was the cocoon—and I got a fragment of it to take a look at and then I made you comfortable and—oh! Your wings are back, too!”

That part gets through to you. You twist around weakly—there’s a flash of red and brown at your back again, still-tender leaf membranes and slightly green branches.

You could  _cry_. Gods. You flop back down, careful not to bend your wings, and take a few deep breaths and concentrate on not crying in front of a mortal.

And then you realize your question never got an answer.

“...Gamzee,” you say again, louder and firmer. “—where’s—Gamzee.”

“I laid him out in the sunshine,” says Jade, and reaches down to get an arm under your shoulders, helping you to your feet. You feel shaky and incorporeal—and  _young._  You feel like you remember feeling, hazily, back in the beginning of your existence. Your legs shake like a newly-born fawn’s. Your eyes can’t quite focus on what you want to focus on. “He kept trying to lie in the sun, even when he wasn’t really conscious. But that means that I can’t really bring him in when it’s raining either, so I just made a temporary canopy over him with some oilcloth and sticks!”

“What... _are_  you?” You croak at her, and she giggles and doesn’t answer the question. “No, ‘m. Serious. What the hell are you.”

“I’m human!” Jade reaches down and takes you by the arm as though you’re human too, like she has nothing to be afraid of here at all. “Come on. Let’s go see your friend.”

She helps you up, and you don’t have the energy to jerk away from her and yell at her for putting your arm around her shoulder and taking most of your weight off of your feet like you’re some sort of human invalid. The two of you hobble out into the rain together.

Gamzee is a dark figure under the makeshift shelter of canvas and wood. You duck under it—it’s surprisingly tall and spacious, big enough you could reach up over your head and not touch the fabric, and you wonder for a second how the hell a human managed to put this together without any help before she unhooks your arm from her shoulder and folds you gently but irresistibly down onto your knees next to Gamzee’s unconscious body.

The first thing you notice is that he’s covered in blood again. The damage that had been done to his wing, you saw—but you missed things as well, in the dark. These don’t look like the careful, neat lashes that he had when you first met him; they’re vicious, torn and crusted in dirt and muck as though he was rolling on the ground with a wild animal clawing his sides. His legs are battered and bruised almost black (clear and high on one thigh, distinct from the mass of bruises, there’s a terrible, swollen, purple and black and red spot in the shape of a huge, cloven hoof), and his arm on the same side as his broken wing is bent oddly above the elbow. There are two lengths of wood bound to it, holding it straight, tied with woven human bandages.

“I managed to finish putting an emergency splint on his arm and then he started growling in his sleep when I went near him,” says Jade, and helps you down to the ground again, close enough you can crawl forward to get a look at him.

“He’s going to be so mad,” you say, distantly. “...I’ll have to fix his arm again. So mad...”

You lean forward, hesitate a second, and then brush some of his long, wild hair out of his face. It’s come out of its braid, and there’s blood in it, catching at your fingers—smaller braids that you didn’t put into it, and stones and feathers that you didn’t notice in the dark. The vague smears of some kind of facepaint. Little, glittering purple stones almost the same color as his blood. Someone else has been painting his skin and taking care of his hair for him and it makes some part of you hurt with this weird, aching, possessive anger.

And then one of his eyes cracks open. He shifts and then stiffens. “ _Shhhhiiiiiit,_ “ he groans, and then tries to breathe in and goes very, very pale under the blood and muck and paint. “ _—be blighted and_ damned—!”

“Don’t move.”

He keeps moving. You grab a hold of one big, spiraled horn and shake him a little. “ _Don’t move._  Gamzee you’re a mess, will you just lie still already? Gods.”

He jerks a little at the sound of his name; he groans and his eyes crack just slightly wider, looking around for the first time. “... _Karkat_ ,” he says, bleary and wondering, and then his eyes snap wide. “— _Karkat_!” He jerks upright and lets out a terrible, agonized, keening howl that sets your teeth on edge and makes Jade cry out in pain. His wings try to spread and support him; he screams again, and you can see his face starting to flatten and go feral, a terrified response to the sudden pain.

“Gamzee!” He doesn’t seem to hear you. You duck his flailing good wing, throw yourself forward and get your hands on his face again, hold onto his horn to hold him still for you. “ _Gamzee, shhhh._  The pain will get better if you just  _stop moving,_ you big idiot! Now you do as I’m telling you  _right this second_ , stop yelling and thrashing around and making it worse and just  _LIE. BACK. DOWN._ “

He doesn’t lie back down, but he does stop struggling, finally. His chest is heaving and every time he breathes in he winces, but he doesn’t seem to give it too much notice. He’s staring at you like he’s never seen you before.

“You’re okay,” he says, numb. “You’re okay?”

Okay is a bit of a strong word, but you nod anyway, because the last thing he needs right now is more worry. “Sure,” you manage, and then just swear a lot, because he reaches out with his undamaged arm and reels you in to hold onto you like he’s afraid you’ll vanish if he ever lets go again. You can feel his heart pounding through his chest, feel the clawed gashes in his skin under your hands, you’re getting sticky with blood and he smells absolutely horrendous and you grab him back and hold on tight. Noises in your ear, almost comforting, fragments of words;  _I’m here I’m here blighted plague won’t come here again I’m here you’re okay I’m here_ like you’re the one that needs soothing right now, the stupid hysterical idiot.

You pet his tangled hair as best you can, and he squeezes you so hard you have to groan. Your bones are new and fresh and pliant but the last thing you want to do is test how far they’ll bend. Swatting at him yields very few results, but when you do finally get him to let go enough that you can see his face, you’re less surprised than you ever would have expected to see that he’s crying again.

“Stop that,” you tell him, but it comes out a lot gentler than you intended it to. He sniffs, scrubs at his eyes, but it hardly helps. When he makes muffled sobbing sounds they sound ever-so-slightly goat-like, and it would be funny if you weren’t so overwhelmingly, sickeningly, stupidly glad to have him here. You pat his face awkwardly, like you did when you pacified him before you both passed out; his lower lip trembles and his eyes well up with fresh tears all over again. You have to laugh, but you also have to sigh, so you kind of do both and hug him again so he can hide his face in your shoulder. “Oh you big  _baby_ ,” you say into his tangled hair, and he half-laughs wetly, muffled. “...I’m fine. It’ll take more than a few demigods to finish me off.”

“ _I was so angry,_ “ he says, and as you smooth your fingers over the joints of his wings, the undamaged one starts to melt away. The wounded one stays, and you wonder if it has to heal before it can go again, whether there are laws to his transformations that you don’t know about. You’re willing to learn. “ _He told—go wreck you, kill your trees, I—_ “

“Who?” You’re obviously missing crucial parts of this story. You remember the dark clouds to the south, how they vanished again just before the satyrs came to your forest. “Who told them?”

The question makes him shudder. “... _sire_ ,” he says, barely audible, and you remember the stories he told you; a massive king of satyrs, one of the ancient spirits. The one he disappointed last time he came to you.  _“...sorry—I messed up, I messed the hell up I told him where I’d been I messed up, sorry—_ “

“ _Shh_.”

He nods and squeezes you like a real actual human baby with a comfort toy. You sigh and pet him. Jade is standing by, eyes wide, watching the two of you—you give her a “ _what, really_?” look and she turns red under the brown of her skin and turns her back.

“Is he going to send more?” You ask when it finally looks like he’s calmed down—you don’t want to set him off again, but that’s kind of important. You have things you would need to do, to set up, people to talk to. But he shakes his head. You’re...honestly surprised. “Why not?”

He takes a deep, shaky breath.

“... _‘s dead,”_  he says, very quietly. “...killed him. He’s dead.” You stare straight ahead, suddenly breathless, and he seems to take your silence for judgment; his hands are shaking suddenly, almost imperceptible, but clear from where you are in his arms.

“If I was king,” he starts, aborted and pleading, like he needs your forgiveness for this. “—if I was king I could tell them, tell them not to—to leave you—but—”

He killed his sire.

He killed his sire  _for you._

“...but he was damned  _strong_ ,” he finishes, wretched. His words are getting more and more mixed up the longer you search silently for words, his voice gets softer and shakier. “Couldn’t, it—days and nights, I don’t even know how long, just fighting, and when I was done and he was dead they were too long gone and I—couldn’t— _remember_ —couldn’t get a single thought on of what to do so I just ran, just followed them—”

“You met them coming back,” you fill in for him, finally, and he nods slowly, uncertainly. “...you...remembered to take my wings back from them, though. You had them when you found us.”

“I did...?” He sounds almost hopeful. Then his breath catches. “—they took—?!” His hands run up your back, touching the young wood of your wings. “Oh gods, oh hell, no, what did they—?!” You have to shush him again—he sounds terrified at the thought.

“They’re back now, I’m okay.  _Gamzee, listen to me._ “ He’s shaking. Hells, you’re both such terrible wrecks right now, but at least as much as he’s panicking he isn’t going to let go of you. He won’t let go of you. If he did, you don’t think you’d be able to stay calm either. “I. Am. Alright. Now.  _Shh._  It was terrible, but it happened and now it’s done. No— _Gamzee,_  gods’ sakes. Quit. Think about something happy, I don’t care, just stop— _doing_ that. It’s not your fault.”

“I  _told_  him where—”

“That part is a little bit your fault,” you allow, and he makes a noise that’s half a laugh and half a sob. You remember the proud, arrogant spirit you met half a year ago and you almost laugh; he’s battered now, bruised, scarred, his face contorted with the force of his sobs and dripping all over everything and he won’t stop trying to pull you back in so he can hide his face again. He’s such and idiot and he’s a murderer and a monster and he’s so precious to you, you just want to  _die_. “Stop,” you tell him sternly, and he whines and nuzzles at you. He’s smearing tears all over you—and worse, but you focus on the tears. “Gamzee, no.  _No._  Stop. Listen, get your shit together, you’re a king now. What do kings act like?”

He sniffs. His voice is reedy and hoarse from crying. “Uh—”

“Exactly, not goddamn well like  _this._ “ You have no idea what you’re talking about—you’re pretty sure a king of spirits can act like whatever the hells he wants, although humans seem to hold most of their rulers to higher standards. “Pull yourself together. Come on. You look terrible.”

“ _Nnngh_ ,” he says, and slumps on you. You pat his head a few times, then pull him away again, ignoring his complaining whine.

“...you’re making me smell like a human barnyard animal,” you inform him. “You stink like a wet goat.”

“... _am_  a wet goat,” he says, miserable and solemn, “...’m the king, brother. King of all those wet, blighted goats.”

You look at each other for a few seconds, frowning seriously, before you both break down into terrible, wet snorts at the exact same moment and just slump, laughing grossly into each other’s shoulders.

“I missed you,” he says, thick and chokey and horrible, and your eyes start prickling and you have to swallow hard.

“...I know. Me too.”


	9. human things for human needs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> *RETORNS*

Eventually you have to get up and remember that you’re a highly dignified forest spirit with a shitload of responsibility and dignity and stuff.  You squirm your way out of Gamzee’s skinny arms again—he growls, but only half-heartedly. 

 _Brother,_ his voice says in your head, _don’t—_

“Pull yourself together,” you tell him, not as nastily as you meant to, and he grumbles to himself.  His eyes flicker over your shoulder to Jade’s back, still turned toward you—his face lengthens subtly, slipping into his second form.  The one you first met him in, holy gods was that only a few seasons ago?  Feels like an age.  You should yell at him for being so cagey around her—she’s not all that bad, okay, she helped you out a lot and you don’t know if you would have been awake to calm Gamzee down without her there to clean you up and make you think again.  But you can still remember the night he first told you _you’re the only one who’s seen this face_ and you refrain from yelling.  Just for now.  Not that you’re selfish or anything.

 _a sacrifice,_ he says in your head, and he narrows his eyes at Jade.  _HOW COMES SHE HERE, BROTHER._

“Human,” you say sternly.  “The word is ‘human’, you lummox.  She woke me up and closed some of the wounds your—” you stop—the last thing he needs right now when he’s already feeling defensive and protective of you is to be reminded that it was his people who went after you.  “…she fixed me up, okay?  I owe her.  If you can’t be civil, at least just…don’t be an ass.”

 _I thought you named me ‘goat’._  He sounds sulky.  _now an ass, am I?_

“Oh for gods’ sakes.” 

Jade huffs.  “Can I turn back around now?”

**_no_ **

“Yes.”  And then you pull back and look at him and frown.  “—actually—oh, blighted hells.  No, actually no.  Listen, can you—just—go somewhere?”

“Um…” she glances at you, half turned around, frowning.  “I could?”  She looks suspicious.  “—are you going to be here when I get back?”

“I don’t know where the hells else I would go.”

She squints at you for a long time, and then slowly nods.  “…okay,” she says.  “I need to go back to town and get some food anyway!”  She starts to turn—looks back at you.  “…do you want anything?”

“Anything what.”

“From town!”

You stare at her.  “What the hell would I want from a human town?”

She shrugs.  “Something shiny,” she says.  “A couple of baskets to carry things in!  You wouldn’t believe how much easier it is to gather herbs and flowers and bones and things when you have a basket.”

“I don’t want any gods-damned human baskets.”

“How about some meat you don’t have to go out and find for yourself?”

You start to yell and then stop for a second.  You are…really _really_ hungry.  You don’t want to go and have to find meat, because it always takes you forever to find meat that died naturally (especially enough to feed Gamzee, he eats _so much_ ).  And you don’t want to leave Jade alone back here with Gamzee either, especially as long as he’s still calling her a “sacrifice”. 

“…get us a deer.”

She stares down at her hands, flicking out her fingers like she’s counting something, then nods.  “…they owe me enough for a deer,” she says, and straightens up.  “Okay!  Venison it is.”

She throws her belongings over her shoulder and turns.  You can feel her scratching the bark on your trees as she goes, little prickles like bug-bites on your soul.  You ruffle your leaves and shake off the little stings.  It’s not like she’s hurting anything.  You actually don’t mind _too_ much if she finds her way back.

You turn back and Gamzee has shrunk again.  One of his wings is gone—the broken one still hangs, ugly with brokenness, over his shoulder.  He smiles at you, almost shyly, and kind of edges closer.

“…why’d you send her away, brother?”

“I have to fix your wing.”

He flinches, smile falling flat.  You haven’t even touched him yet, but he’s already morphing back toward his second form defensively, growing even as he shrinks down in on himself.  _brother no_

“Brother yes.” You reach out for his crooked wing—he pulls back and then groans as the webs of his broken wing catch the air, dragging at it painfully.  “Come on.  _Shhh,_ it’ll just hurt for a bit and then it’ll start to feel better, you _know_ it will.”

_don’t want it_

_IT’LL HURT_

“I know it will.  And then feel better.”

_IT’LL **HURT**_

“ _Shush._ ” You reach out and stroke his long, unkempt hair (you’re going to have to put it back in its plait for him, you’re not sure he even knows how, this massive disaster—) and he quiets just a little.  “Do you want it to just stay broken and crooked and wrong?”

He huddles down.

_…no_

“Here.” You grab him by an arm—pull him over to one of your strongest, thickest trees and prop him up facing it.  “You can maul that however much you want, help you deal with it.  This won’t take more than a minute or two.  You think you can deal with that, big strong wine-sopping god like you?”

He doesn’t answer, just makes a miserable noise and holds onto the tree-trunk.  You look him over closely for the first time; the wing is bent oddly near the shoulder, and the web above and around it is torn.  You think that’ll grow back if you can fix the damage enough for him to banish and re-summon his wings, but the broken bone is a warped, evil wound, full of the foul rot-magic he used to destroy part of your forest once upon a time, and it keeps his wing here.  One of the delicate finger-bones is also snapped, but that’s a clean, fine break—it should heal pretty easily.  You’ll brace it, but it doesn’t need much.  The rest of him is a battered mess, and his right leg has started to tremble under even a little of his weight.  His claws are already digging into the bark.  His eyes are squeezed shut. 

And then you take a deep breath and take hold of his twisted wing and his eyes snap open.

“ _Ow,_ ” he croaks, and his hands dig into the tree’s bark.  “ _—ah—_!” and his physical voice keens and snaps into inhuman noises, his mouth changing shape and choking off his words, but in your head they’re perfectly clear, _no no no that HURTS_

“Almost there.”  Gods, you can hear the crackle of bones moving when you straighten his wing out and he _howls,_ his wings try to jerk out of your hands to batter at you and the pain of trying to pull free chokes his voice off to a hoarse, whimpering gasp.  “ _Shhh, shh—_ ”

 ** _HURTS IT HURTS_ ** he drags his claws through the bark and you can see him starting to grow taller and heavier and his claws curling and splintering the wood, his body changing as it fights to defend itself but you’re almost done _almost done_ — _stop **stop STOP—**_ your head pounds at the force of the command, your muscles twitch to obey and pull away, but you grit your teeth through the awful noises he’s making , press a piece of birch-bark to his wing and unfurl it like a silver scarf, layering over his wing near the shoulder, stabilizing the worst of the break.  He shudders against the tree as the bark thickens and then stills—his howls die to groans and whimpers that die to wretched, awful panting.

He twitches when you come up and pet his hair, and he growls weakly but doesn’t pull away.

 _not ever again,_ he groans in your head, voice small.  _not EVER again_

“If I hadn’t fixed it, it would have hurt for a lot longer and healed wrong,” you say, and he lets you squeeze one horn and run your fingers through his hair, keeps his eyes squeezed shut and breaths in harsh, long breaths against your shoulder.  “You probably wouldn’t ever have been able to fly again, alright?”  And there’s some selfish part of you that pangs a bit at that, godsdammit, some part of you wishes he was stuck down on the ground with you.  You shake your head and try not to think about it.  “…if you want me to stop splinting things, you have to stop breaking things.”

_I_

**_I_ ** _didn’t break SHIT_

“ _—had me down,_ ” he says against your shoulder, and you can feel him going smaller as he gets himself back under control, as the pain dies away. His voice is muffled and slurred, but it clears as his face changes shape and his mouth forms itself back to a more familiar shape. “ _—had me down on the ground, brother, and he got his hoof on my wing—_ “

_didn’t feel it then when it snapped_

_BY THE GODS BUT I FEEL IT NOW_

You imagine Gamzee as he looked when he came to your forest, and try to imagine how a god that much bigger and _older_ would look as they fought—holy shit, your mind can’t even seem to make sense of the idea, it’s incomprehensible.  The hoofmarks on his lags, the clawmarks on his sides—you’ve never heard of satyrs fighting, but you’ve seen wild animals try to tear each other apart before, battering each other with all four limbs, snapping their fangs for each other’s throats.  Gods. 

“ _Shhh,_ ” you say in the meantime, and he sighs.  “It’ll stop hurting eventually.”

_all things do_

You blink down at him, but he’s not looking at you—he’s staring morosely off into the trees, still huddled awkwardly in your too-short arms (why does he have to be so much bigger than you?). 

“Wow,” you say, and he jumps and looks up at you.  “By all that’s good, that sounded almost _wise._   Are you sure you didn’t hit your head on the tree just now?”

 _ha ha ha ha,_ says his mind dryly, but his body betrays him by snorting with actual laughter.  He pulls his hands away from the tree; there’s a darkened, rotted patch where he was touching it.  _shit_

You reach out past him ( _his back is cool and shaking against your chest and you want to hold him_ ) and press your hand to the bark—it would have been a strain, a while ago, to grow the bark into that cast and then fix the rot so quickly afterward, but there’s a weird sort of ache in your chest and the rot is already vanishing even as you reach for your power.

He blinks at you.  _you grew,_ he says, surprised.  _that shit was far from your power when it was last I knew you_

( _FF says when she sees a domain change like this it means you’re in love)_

“Shut up,” you say, and shove yourself up and away from him.  “Don’t mess with your wing, but keep trying to send it away every couple of days.”  You fight with your selfish, stupid side for a few minutes, and then force out the words, “…it would heal faster if you’d change down.  Use your real face.”

_that face is for you_

_YOU ONLY_

_best beloved_

Your face _burns._   “Well,” you say, and it’s exactly the thought you were trying not to think, but it’s him saying it, not the selfish voice in the back of your head, and you kind of want to hug him some more. “Well.  Yeah.  Well.  Whenever Jade isn’t here, change down.”

“ _Gladly_ ,” he says, warped through half-changed lips, and settles into his first form like the shadow of a face shifting in smoke.  He rolls the shoulder with the broken wing, wincing—his shoulder joint pops and creaks and cracks like a branch in ice.  “ _Ow._   Son of a thousand festering—“

“There you are!”

Gamzee changes so fast he slams his head into a branch right at the root of one horn.  He drops down, holding his head and whining, as Jade comes bouncing into the clearing.  It’s still cloudy, drizzling, but now it’s starting to get darker and Jade has lit her lantern again, swinging on the end of her staff. 

“I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to find you again,” Jade says brightly, and swings a bag off her shoulder. It clinks and clanks.  “I brought some cooking things, some spices, some chemicals—”

Gamzee hisses at her.  She looks up, notices him crouching down, and waves.  Gamzee, finally upright and awake for the first time, does not seem to scare her at all.  What in all hells is wrong with this human?

Gamzee edges forward, head cocked on one side, snarl easing away into curiosity as his nose twitches.

_WHAT’S THAT YOU’RE BRINGING_

_human feeding goods_

_HUMAN THINGS FOR HUMAN NEEDS_

_affairs of the body all_

_CARNAL_

_and why would my best beloved have need of them_

“Wow!” says Jade, “—are you talking into my head?  How—”

_ANSWER_

“You make it sound like I’m bringing him brothel-wear or something!”  Jade says, and laughs.  You and Gamzee glance at each other, equally confused, but both of you are tired as hell and neither of you ask.  “I didn’t think you _needed_ them or anything, but you have to admit they would make things easier!  Besides, it sounds like you’re not… _entirely_ unexperienced!” Jade winks broadly at Gamzee, like they’re sharing some big secret.  “With… _affairs of the body_.” 

Her tone is teasing, there’s not even a touch of fear to it.  Gamzee hesitates—his ears perk up a little bit. 

… _no,_ he says, and cocks his head to one side.  _not entire_

_small meat being_

“Jade!” says Jade brightly, like it doesn’t worry her at all that a satyr almost half as tall as her again with jagged fangs sticking grossly out of his mouth is calling her _small meat being._   “What do you mean?  This sounds like a fun story!”

Gamzee perks up even more, and you would swear you can _feel_ him preening inside his head—vain son of a bitch. 

_it is_

_YOU WANT TO HEAR IT_

_little stone-named one_

“And I’ll go grow you some more dinner?” you say sourly.  “You attention-hungry bastard.”

He frowns.  _aw brother_

_don’t want to—_

“No, don’t give me the big sad eyes,” you say, and you glance at Jade, step forward and pull him down to you, wrap your wings around the pair of you.  For a second, his face flickers softer, more familiar, he smiles at you behind the shield of your wings. 

“ _Just,_ ” you start to say, and stop, unsure of what you’re trying to say.  “—I mean—”

“ _Shit’s gone strange,_ ” he says quietly, and you sigh and nod because it has, it’s different now, so much has happened in so little time.  “ _…but it’ll be whole again, beloved._ ”  He bumps your noses together—you can feel the velvet on the bridge of his nose, the knot of the scar that crosses it.  “…pick me some flowers.”

“Pick your own damned flowers,” you say, and know when you get back you’ll have a handful of flowers.  “Bugger you.”

He snorts and stands up straighter, and his face changes smoothly back to his god-face. 

_begone from us_

_PUSHY LITTLE MOUTHFUL_

The familiarity actually forces a smile on your face, and Gamzee crinkles up his eyes at you and then flops down on the ground next to Jade.

_what do they say of us where you come from_

_LITTLE STONE-NAMED ONE_

You leave them to it.

\--

By the time you come back, Gamzee looks considerably more relaxed and Jade is sitting cross-legged across from him, laughing at something.  Gamzee’s eyes are crinkled up and he’s making a really truly disgusting noise like he’s choking on something, the sharp _khakhakha_ of his laughter.  You slow, vaguely unsettled, looking around the clearing; there’s a fire by your cave, much bigger than you would have built, with what looks like the entire deer roasting over top of it.  The smell is unbelievable.  Your mouth waters.

“ _No,_ ” Jade is gasping, and she pushes her big glass eye-frames out of the way to wipe her eyes.  “Oh gods, no, you’re lying to me!”

 _A whole oak tree,_ Gamzee says in your head, and even in your head his voice sounds shaky with laughter.  _I went and gave her up my place in festival for that, sister deserved that much—_ Karkat!

“Karkat!”  Jade echoes, and smiles at you like she’s actually happy to see you.  “Hello!  Is that honeysuckle?”

Gamzee makes a pleased noise and springs up, sniffing at you eagerly—he makes a happy crooning sound when he smells the honeysuckle, and reaches out for it.  You pull away.

“You’ll get some when the meat’s done,” you say, and he groans and gives you the pleading eyes.  You stand firm.  “No.”

 _Brother…_ he whines in your head, and then you glance back at Jade and he follows your gaze and remembers she’s there.  His face colors—he straightens up and shifts his feet uncomfortably.  What?  His body language seems to say.  Me?  Whining like a newly-formed godling?  Ridiculous.

“Don’t worry,” says Jade brightly, and gets up on her knees to waddle ungainly over to the fire and poke at the meat.  The meat crackles.  “…almost done.  They’re kind of scared of me down there in town, y’know, they gave me the best they had!  And grandfather taught me how to cook deer, so you are in for a _treat_!”

She pulls out some of her big human bottles full of dead, dried-up plants—they smell different when they’re dried, spicy and strange and kind of like they make you want to sneeze.  She sprinkles her plants copiously over the deer, wets her fingers in some kind of liquid from a jar with silver and steel hanging all over it, and then claps her hands sharply.

The flare of magic really does make you sneeze.  Gamzee bleats and flares his only manifested wing in shock, then hisses in pain as his broken wing protests.  Jade either doesn’t notice or doesn’t want to comment, because she hardly even glances at you.

“What the _hell_ was—”

“It’s a marinade spell!”  Jade claps again, focusing on the deer over the fire—you sneeze again.  Gamzee’s ears flick.  “It sinks the spices into the meat and flavors it, and the ash-water makes it juicier.  It’s a family secret!”  She claps a third time.  “—there.  Supper is served!”

“…alright,” you say, very slowly, and settle down closer to the fire.  Because wow, it really does smell good, now the too-strong smell of the plants she sprinkled over it has settled down a little bit to a bearable level.  “It’s not going to be any better than the way we make it, though.”

\--

“…that was the best thing I have ever tasted,” you say an hour later, and lick your fingers clean as Gamzee makes a wordless noise of agreement and tears off another haunch to stuff into his big, fangy maw.  “And I’ve existed for…” you try to count up in your head.  “…a long damned time,” you conclude, and lie back.  Jade finished eating long before you—humans need so little and fill so quickly, she didn’t even eat an entire haunch.  She looks satisfied though.  She’s taken off her big, heavy cloak for the first time, and she’s counting bottles and writing down mysterious series of symbols on a piece of hide. 

“I told you you were in for a treat,” she says, and finishes off another string of symbols with a flourish.  “I’ve never done it for something as big as a deer before, but I knew it worked wonders on rabbit, even stringy plains hare!  I thought we’d have some left for tomorrow though, hm.”  She frowns at the mostly-demolished deer.  Gamzee finishes stripping a legbone with relish and tears another chunk off with his claws, obviously enjoying every second.  Hm.  Alright so maybe he’s eating a lot really fast.  Even gods have their limits.

“Gamzee, you’re going to make yourself sick.”

He shakes his head and says something through his half-transformed, very full mouth.  It’s completely incomprehensible.  Deer meat goes everywhere.  You swear at him and he swallows and hunches a little, ears flattening apologetically. 

 _fight with my sire did sap and suck my strength off me,_ he says.  _i need this._

“Well at least take a break and get a drink then,” you say, and he sighs and jams the last of his meat into his mouth, slinking over to the little stream on all fours to drink.  The sun set a while ago; the air is cool and the very first firebugs of summer are starting to rise out of the grass and hover, glittering, over the wrecked wood and slowly-growing saplings of your forest. 

“…Karkat?”

You blink and look back at Jade.  She’s looking down at the ground next to you, and when you follow her gaze you see small silver-blue flowers springing up around you in thick, cushioned banks.  You didn’t so much as _think_ about making flowers, and there they are.  Shit.  You turn your face away from Jade and pretend you never heard her say your name.

“…Karkat…”

“ _Karkat._ ”

“What?!”

She doesn’t look intimidated by the way you snapped your fangs.  She looks…enchanted.  That’s the word for it.  She looks enchanted. 

“Do you make these when you’re…happy?”

“I’m never happy,” you say immediately, and then glower when she almost falls over laughing.  “Sod off.”

“I’m sorry to break this to you after you’ve lived without knowing it for so long,” she says, and she reaches out and for a moment you think she’s going to put her hand on yours.  Then it just comes to rest on the flowers next to yours, feeling the velvety carpet of them under her rough palms.  She looks up at you, and her eyes gleam green and fiery through her lashes.  A bright red poppy springs up next to her hand.  “…but you’re happy.  You’re really, really happy right now.”

And she sounds so gods-damned sure, as she smiles at you and Gamzee comes wandering back over to the fire—she says it so firmly, you can’t find the right words to argue.

 

\--

Two days later, they send somebody to your forest.

It’s Nepeta, of course, because her forest is closest.  She lives in the evergreens to your south, and never was as careful as she probably should be, even as a god—she’s so reckless sometimes you think she must have been human once.  Not that humans are the only reckless ones, as you’re so _graciously_ reminded of every time you have to look over Gamzee’s clawed and battered sides and vividly-bruised legs for him. 

She brings company.

You know who it is as soon as they come into your forest—when Sollux came a few months ago you didn’t notice him, but he’s hard to track and hard to catch, especially travelling as a swarm, and anyway you were lax then.  Now you have wards up everywhere you can build them.  You’re not getting caught off guard like that again.  Even if Gamzee assures you any of his tribe will listen to him unquestioningly now.  Jade tells you it’s like a human whose home has been robbed.  You tell her her petty human metaphors pale in insignificance next to your might and authority.  She laughs at you.  So does Gamzee, the filthy traitor.  You can’t even reach the back of his head to smack it.

He notices a little bit after you do, as they’re starting to get closer—you can’t feel Nepeta, so used to travelling through forests and walking lightly, but you can feel _him_ , marching through your forest on those great, clomping hooves and crushing undergrowth and young saplings.  Gamzee sit up when they get within a quarter-mile, sniffing the air and quirking his ears to listen.

_Smells like HORSE_

“Yeah,” you say, and concentrate on growing your trees.  At the very least, this place is going to be impressive as hells when _he_ gets here.  He’s going to look down his nose at you anyway, but you’re not going to give him any more opportunities than he’s already got.  God you hate him.  “They aren’t the kind you can eat.”

He looks mildly offended, like impugning his ability to shove any given horse into his mouth is legitimately insulting to him.  _You can eat ANY KIND OF HORSE, brother_

“Not this kind.”  You think about it for a second and the correct grudgingly, “…well, you probably could, but Nepeta would slaughter you.  Besides he probably tastes disgusting.”

_He?_

“You’ll…see.”

By the time you hear cautious footsteps, your trees have grown up to at least a respectable height and width for a minute’s walk in any direction from your clearing.  Jade has been relocated to the cave—the last thing you want is for her to get caught in some kind of godly business and get hurt, stupid curious human.  Gamzee is sprawled in the middle of the clearing as you climb trees to check branches and dart around their bases to check how deep their roots have grown, with one of his weird cut-off-reeds instruments, making aimless music that’s not bad to listen to except for its persistent lack of a cohesive tune.

You’re away from the main clearing, high in the top of a tall tree, when you see Gamzee sit up straight and put aside his pipes.  A voice calls out “…Karkat?”

“He went out,” says Gamzee, and then Nepeta hits him going so fast you can’t see her and bears him straight to the ground.

Gamzee makes an ungodly _shrieking_ noise as he lands hard on his back and his wing hits the ground with a sharp jolt—Nepeta hisses _“WHAT DID YOU DO WITH HIM?!”_ and there’s a thundering noise and a volley of sharp twinges as branches snap and hooves pound roots—

You throw yourself forward, get between Gamzee and Nepeta and spread your wings to their full spread—which might be more than it was before you cocooned actually, damn.  Wow.  You haven’t really played around with them since then, you never give too much thought to your wings.  What’s the point of spreading wings you can’t use to fly?  They just take up space.  But they do also make a really nice screen between your—well, _Gamzee,_ and Nepeta.  She’s a vast mountain cat when you push her back, all dappled golden fur and ropey muscles under immaculate pelt, but she straightens up as you spread your arms and wings wide in front of her, melting back into a more human form. 

“Karkat!”

“Nepeta!”  You echo back to her, and move over as she moves, keeping your wings between Gamzee and Nepeta.  “What the hells?”

She has the decency to look a little bit chagrined.  “You weren’t here,” she says.

“You looked around for all of ten seconds before you—”  You take a deep breath and let it out.  Doesn’t matter.  Goddammit, you don’t even want to get in a fight with Nepeta, and not just because she could tear you to shreds.  “…you brought your…friend.”

“Oh.”  She knows how you feel about him.  She glances back at the sound of crunching branches and winces.  “Um…yeah.  He wouldn’t stay behind, sorry.  He’s gotten really protective since I came back!  But he’s really—”

“Nepeta!”

“Oh gods,” says Nepeta under her breath, and turns back to call over her shoulder.  “Equius I’m fine!  Please stop crushing all of Karcat’s trees!”

“This forest is _inconvenient_ ,” says Equius, and completely fails to stop crushing your godsdamned trees as he shoves through the last few branches into the clearing, leaving a trail of snapped branches in his wake.  Your bones ache from the snapping impacts, but you steadfastly refuse to wince or show any sign of discomfort.  Sod this guy.  “I much prefer your forest, Nepeta, the trees are so much more—oh.”

“Equius,” you say, as insolently as possibly, and Equius paces forward slowly into the light.  His lower half is pitch-black today, massive as ever, all stomping hooves and rippling muscle.  He could probably kick you to death without noticing.  “What do you want.”

He snorts—his tail swishes.  “ _Nepeta_ wished to—”

“We were just checking in to see if you were alright!”  Nepeta says hurriedly, before her…partner, whatever they are…can say something unbelievably offensive and stupid.  “After all the…well, the things that happened, I didn’t know what was going on, so I came to check!”  She lowers her voice and glances past you at Gamzee, who is getting back on his feet with angry little mind-mutters that feel like somebody standing a few inches behind you and breathing just loud enough to hear.  It’s creepy as hells.  He doesn’t seem to know how to get up with one wing that he can’t use—he keeps starting to flare it out for balance and then bleating and folding it again.  “… _it was_ them, _wasn’t it?_ ”

“Yeah,” you say, like it’s no big deal, but you can see by the look on her face that your casual tone of voice wasn’t very convincing.  “He figured it out, okay?  He told them where I was by accident—”

“Oh my god—”

"Nepeta," says Equius, with intense control evident in every single gods-damned word.  "--is this--"

"Oh," says Nepeta, and fidgets.  "--um..."

You turn and look and Gamzee is finally upright, no longer shielded by the spread of your wings, way too tall to stay hidden from the intruders into your clearing.  He’s almost on a level with Equius, even with the massive horse body—taller than he was before he went down, definitely.  You wonder if he did that on purpose. 

 _hey,_ says Gamzee, and even inside your head his voice sounds kind of unsure.  He pauses a second, like he's trying to remember what he's supposed to do next, and then kind of ducks his head a little in the worst possible approximation of a bow.  ... _i'm gamzee_

" _Nepeta_ ," Equius repeats, voice rising dangerously in volume. 

"Well..." Nepeta glances at you, and you don't know Zahhak very well but you can guess by the look in Nepeta's eyes what's going to happen if you just tell him the truth flat out. 

“He’s a friend of mine,” you say, as loud and clear and angry as possible, and hope like hell it works.  “If you have a problem with him being here after everything he’s done for me you can get out of my forest.  I owe him a hell of a lot more than I owe you.”

 _Hey I heard of you,_ says Gamzee’s voice in your head, and you curse internally because _dammit_ you are almost completely sure he’s about to wreck whatever kind of imposing image you just managed to salvage— _little sacrifice-meat turned godling, you_

_LITTLE HUMAN WHELP FUCKED WITH THE QUEEN OF THE GONE-BY_

_Got himself CHANGED_

Equius’s face goes blotchy red.

“I,” he says, and sputters a little bit.  “That—I don’t appreciate—”

 _You don’t look down at my best friend for SHIT_ and there’s the pride again, the haughty tone of command he tried to use on you when you first found him.  But instead of telling him to shut up, Equius is going more and more red in the face.  _Him I killed my king for_

_HIM I WOULD KILL YOU FOR_

“Okay, settle down!”  You turn your back on Equius, not really giving a shit whether he reads that as the flagrant insult it basically is, and grab Gamzee by the arm.  His face has gone flat and hostile again, all teeth and mad eyes.  “Calm down, and do _not_ kill anybody.  You hear me?  Hey.  Eyes down here!  Do.  Not.  Kill anybody.”

"You-- _killed your chieftain_?"  Equius sounds a little bit choked.  Gamzee, still looking bristly and defensive, looks up past you and nods. 

"Oh."  Equius stares at him.  There is something going on behind that face, god only knows what it is--no, hell, even the gods don't know, you are a god and you haven't got the slightest clue.  "... _oh._ "

They stare at each other for a long couple of minutes, and then Jade says "...are you a god too?"

You jump about a mile and Jade ducks to one side as your wings narrowly miss her face.  She’s staring past you at Equius with the same look on her face she had when she looked at your wings.  She has one hand on the hilt of her knife too, not that you think she’s intending to fight him.  She’d have to be suicidal, he’s enormous. 

“ _Jade,_ gods dammit I told you to go and—”

“Nobody seemed to be dying or getting hurt,” Jade says dismissively, and _waves you off._   “Settle down, I followed your orders!  Wow!  An actual centaur!”

Equius stares at her.  Nepeta stares at her too, although she looks kind of weirdly delighted and Equius looks like somebody just shoved something up his ass.

"--is that a human?"

"Yes," says Jade, "...I am."

Equius blinks again, and haha he doesn't know how to react to a human that talks to him directly.  After the murmurs you've heard about his past and how he came into power as a mountain god, you guess you're not surprised.  He wouldn't want to be too closely associated, would he? 

“No, wait,” says Jade, and walks right up into his space.  Gamzee shifts uneasily at your shoulder, like he wants to grab her and pull her back.  “No, I think I’ve heard your story!  Are you…the Knight of the Iron Cage?”    `

Equius freezes.  “Are you addressing me, mortal?” 

It’s a pretty flimsy pretense of ignorance, and Jade doesn’t even really justify it with acknowledgement.  Nepeta is looking from Jade to Equius and back now, eyes wide and pupils slitted.  The dark spots on her skin shift as she breathes. 

“You tried to build an iron cage and trap a fae,” says Jade, and you shudder a little at the thought.  God, the last people you would want to mess with.  “The stories say you caught the queen of the fae herself, but she--”

“How _dare_ you?”

“And I guess that means you must be the huntress!”  says Jade, with completely suicidal brightness, and Nepeta cock s her head on one side and gives her a long look, then bares a couple of really white, sharp teeth.  It’s…probably a smile?  “You were both humans once, right?  Oh, there are so many things I want to talk to you about--your friendship is legendary!”

Nepeta blinks and then smiles again, a good deal more genuine.  Equius is still red in the face and looks utterly offended, but he’s not going to say anything about it, especially since every time he moves you hear a low growl rise in Gamzee’s chest behind you.  You wonder if they would nhave gotten along better some other time, when Gamzee wasn’t already on edge—when he gets in his serious godly mood he gets so goddamn stubborn.

“So you’re just here to see if I’m okay?”  You spread your wings and fold them again, showing off your new wingspan and the fall-leaf red of the membranes, which are tattered as ever.  “As good as I ever was.  Are we done here?”

“Well, that’s not the only reason!”  Nepeta has come to stand between you and Equius , like she wasn’t even thinking about doing it—you standing in front of Gamzee, her standing in front of Eqiuus, and Jade in the middle looking fascinated and curios and completely unconcerned with the argument going on over her head.  “Terezi has called for another caucus.”

You stare at her a second, and then open your mouth—she cuts over you.

“I know!  You never come.  But this time you should!  You need to introduce…” she waves at Gamzee, and to her credit she does manage to all but the smallest hint of distaste out of her expression.  “…and tell everybody what happened.  And everybody can actually come, for once!  Even Feferi, and you know how hard it is for her to get up to Terezi’s place when she has so much to do and she has to come so far.  It would be really sad if everybody but you was there!”

You hesitate. 

…but you haven’t gone to caucus for at least a hundred years, and that you from the past was a bitter little sapling who couldn’t deal with not getting what he wanted.  You’re a mature…full-grown…you can handle it now, is the point.  Sod that past you. (Has Gamzee ever seen a hot spring before, would he like it?  You bet he would, he’s always soaking up the sun and curling up by the fire…)

You completely ignore the warm little happy feeing that blossoms in your chest at the thought, and then another happy thought occurs to you and you actually find yourself smiling. 

“Alright,” you say.  “Bugger it.  Fine.  I’ll be there.  But I have one condition.”

You look at Jade, and she looks back at you with wide eyes, weird and solid and fleeting and _human_. 

 “…you wanted to see more gods, right?”


End file.
